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Comment by _emacsomancer_ | Hacker News Reader

In fact, the one place you should never try to do any more substantial writing than designing the poster for your niece's 4th birthday part is a word processor.

Word processors are one of the worst environments I can imagine for actually writing. Lots of people surely write in LaTeX in part because they can use a reasonable environment for writing (i.e. a decent text editor).

Also, if you're in a decent text editor, writing LaTeX can be pretty easy (though for lots of things Org mode or markdown etc. may be more appropriate), and you can set up macros to auto-fill in things like the preamble etc.

I essentially write for a living, and I would not have survived had I not adopted LaTeX.

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In my experience the worst part about Word is collaboration. Have you ever seen the track changes interface? It's a sea of incomprehensible, badly segmented, changes where every switch from bold to italics is counted as a separate change mixed in with actual substantive changes and has some little red line among thousands of indistinguishable little red lines pointing to some unclear place in the document. It's a totally unusable interface, and yet some highly collaborative industries (ahem, law) are stuck with it. It's horrifying.

I have seriously considered offering to pay people with whom I'm forced to exchange documents (especially academic law review articles which tend to have thousands of edits) to learn markdown and git just so I don't have to eyestrain my way through that track changes screen

How well does git perform for usual text (not code)? I only use git for code and as far as I know it compare only whole lines, which is not very useful in a text where a paragraph has no line brakes and is about half a page long.

I write in Word as well and merging edits from collaborators with my in-the-meantime-updated document is really anoying and error-prone. I found https://www.simuldocs.com/, but haven't tried it yet.

> How well does git perform for usual text (not code)? I only use git for code and as far as I know it compare only whole lines, which is not very useful in a text where a paragraph has no line brakes and is about half a page long.

As long as you limit your lines' lengths git is just as good for text as it is for code. Of course you're correct that using it for paragraphs without line breaks wouldn't be that great, but my question would be why would you ever do that?

There are a few tweaks you can make to gits diff so it shows changes in a line better, but it's not great.

You can also write each sentence on its own line - output will still put them in the same paragraph. But it's not as nice a reading experience of the markdown.

markdown and git can work together. I've set that each sentence gets its own line, and configured git to use wdiff instead, highlighting the changed words instead of lines.

I'm going to make a contrarian argument, so I should preface it by noting that I write technical documentation in Markdown for a living, write an awful lot of fiction in Markdown as well, and write the rest of my fiction in Scrivener, which only superficially resembles a word processor. Furthermore, I've typeset several books with LaTeX.

Having said that, an awful lot of tech nerds (arguably like myself) seem to seriously underestimate what word processors can do.

Back when I did write fiction in a word processor, and even now when I have to send fiction to editors who expect things in Word format because that is the lingua franca of the non-technical publishing world, I don't have to spend an awful lot of time formatting manuscripts. Word processors have templates, and hierarchical styles. I wouldn't need a macro to auto-fill in the preamble because I'd have a template that included that.

But if I did want a macro, I could have it! A lot of word processors do have macro languages! Many of them also have search-and-replace capability which is basically regular expressions with an easier syntax. For all the crap Word gets, much of it well-deserved, it's actually pretty good at editing prose. It's almost like they've been developing it for over thirty years or something.

If you're in a position -- which I am -- to use a plain text editor for all your prose writing, and you prefer it, that's terrific. And you could totally make the argument that if your final copy is going to be LaTeX, you should start in plain text, whether or not you're using LaTeX markup from the beginning. But the notion that Word is some kind of underpowered little toy no real author should ever possibly use is just, well, wrong.

The simplest way to format a Word document is to select the text and format it. Unfortunately the simplest way is also the worst. If you constrain yourself to using Styles instead you get all the benefits of templates and consistent styling.

There should be a mode in word processors that disallows on-the-fly formatting and forces consistent use of styles.

> But the notion that Word is some kind of underpowered little toy no real author should ever possibly use is just, well, wrong.

I wouldn't characterise it as underpowered so much as wrongly-powered. Just the ability to use macros etc. is not the same as being a real text editor.

I actually started out using word processors, and really wish I had discovered proper text editors sooner. For me, word processors are just miserable working environments.

This isn't me trying to convince you of anything, just adding some anecdata.

I find Word a miserable working environment. On the other hand, I find Pages a delight to work in. It's one of those "it just works" programs for me, and I find documenting editing so easy and intuitive.

It reminds me of those who swear by WordPerfect and wouldn't dream of using Word unless forced to; it's not the class of application they care about it; it's the specific set of tools, their presentation, and how the app matches their work habits.

(Same reason that I just can't use Google Docs, no matter how many workplaces make its use a soft requirement)

People who need to produce Word documents and are writing things like books or scripts may find Scrivener very useful. It's a lot more stable on very large documents.

Scrivener's great right up until the moment when you need to collaborate with someone else, at which point it falls over completely. The usual practice in these scenarios is to write in Scrivener and then when finished export the document to Word format to send to these other parties, but then if they come back to you with edits/feedback/etc. you're stuck with the problem of getting those changes merged back into your original Scrivener document, which is no fun -- especially if you've got multiple rounds of revisions among multiple collaborators to deal with.

Don't get me wrong, I like Scrivener a lot, but in lots of scenarios it just doesn't work as a drop-in replacement for a more general word processor.

I. Love. Scrivener. My workflow is to sketch out ideas in MindNode, drag the outlines into Scrivener, and work in their to flesh them out. I find this infinitely easier and more flexible than outlining and editing in a word processor.

I've heard good things about Ulysses, too, but haven't tried it. I think that whole class of application is inherently better for editing large documents.

Ulysses was fantastic when I last used it to do a multi-chapter document. I separated the chapters into their own files, it remembered each chapter's scroll position so it was easy to look things up in each, and the default templates looked superb.

I stopped using it when it went to a subscription, though. I can't accuse a company that lets you write in Markdown, basically plain text, as rent-seeking, but I dislike my workflow being held hostage like that. Haven't really found a suitable, multi-document replacement yet.

I'd definitely heard good things, but the subscription was a dealbreaker for me, too.

Scrivener has much the same document model, but it's pay-once. That by itself made it much more attractive to me.

There are actually a number of options - given tools like pandoc and org-mode conversion inside of Emacs, there are lots of choices of sane working environments even if you ultimately have to have a Word doc at the end.

I wrote my dissertation in Word. 200+ pages, dozens of captioned and numbered figures and tables, over 100 equations all numbered and referenced, table of contents, cross references, works cited. I found it quite pleasant.

Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it. By that I mean understanding how to use styles for formatting, how to properly insert footnotes/figures/tables etc, and what the implications are if you don't.

When my wife wrote her doctorate she did none of those things, and I ended up spending the best part of two days laboriously going through the entire document to make it conform to the university's style guide for thesis being submitted. Thankfully she uses Scrivener for writing now which as near as possible enforces doing things the right way the first time.

Agreed. I am a power user of Word. All of my formatting is painstakingly performed by applying styles rather than manually formatting things. Headings, subheadings, captions, etc. are all tagged as such. Everything appears in the table of contents, table of figures, etc as it should, and styles can all be updated in one easy sweep.

But if you have even one collaborator who goes in and hammers something by applying manual formatting, the whole thing can be ruined. Actual images can end up showing up along with its caption in the Table of Figures. Entries can go missing from tables. Lone paragraphs can randomly end up with a different style.

Word can successfully manage large, complex documents, but it requires discipline. (as does LaTeX)

> Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it.

I would submit that the same is true for LaTeX.

Maybe the advantage of LaTeX is that people who don't know what they're doing will be scared off by the interface.

You mean that it will be perceived as so difficult to use that people will ignore it in favor of anything else? Calling that an advantage is a rather unique perspective. General document creation is not exactly something only a few specialists need to do.

I was a little tongue in cheek with that comment, but there could be a filter effect where people who aren't prepared to do it properly run away screaming from TeX and its many shells to the loving embrace of Microsoft Word, where they then do a terrible job and give Word a bad reputation.

I've done plenty of work where the customer insists that the final deliverable be in Word format, because that's what they're comfortable with. You can do proper formatting in Word once you learn the tools, and it's not even all that hard, although it can be somewhat unforgiving of screwups. The one thing I wouldn't attempt is to convert a TeX document to Word. In theory that shouldn't be entirely possible, but in practice there are about a million ways it could blow up in your face.

There was a civilized time when universities hired typesetters to do this job properly.

There was also a time when we paid people to operate an elevator. Then we improved the technology enough to make it simple enough for everyone to do it themselves. It has many benefits, and have the user more control over what they got and when they could do things.

I don't know about you, but I really appreciate being able to instantly get the results of a calculation rather than having to submit it to be worked out by a human calculator.

> Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it. By that I mean understanding how to use styles for formatting, how to properly insert footnotes/figures/tables etc, and what the implications are if you don't.

And I've yet to find a guide which instructs on how to set it up properly, how to share styles across documents etc. Do you know of one?

20 years of writing HTML and CSS has spoiled me; many times I'm using Word and thinking "I could do this with one rule in CSS" (often some crazy positioning nonsense with images/tables). If only!

Personally I've never found a single guide that you could hand to someone, but if you're coming from a background of HTML and CSS then you should pick up formatting rules pretty quickly - they're essentially the same, but implemented via a GUI rather than explicitly specified selectors and tags. The key for me is to just pretend that none of the explicit styling options exist - so no use of Bold/Italic/Centered/Whatever buttons, and instead turn on the styles pane and apply all formatting from there.

I wrote one thesis in LaTeX and one in Word. There were some challenges each way, but all in all, doing it in Word was easier. WYSIWYG helped a lot, Word had good documentation, and LaTeX was hard to customize to meet the university's formatting rules.

I will admit, however, that LaTeX run on default settings looks good. Whoever designed that bit had taste.

The math department didn't have a package for that? I taught my middle school teacher latex so his quizes would look nicer.

I don't remember being offered a package or template or anything like that. This was in 1995; I expect things have improved.

I first became aware of TeX generally when towards the end of writing my comp exam responses, I came across @kjhealy's templates. While this looked interesting, I didn't have the time to dive in (I was on deadline for revisions, and borrowing a family member's MacBook as the 8600M in my 15" died).

With that said, I wonder if the people who actually did write a thesis/dissertation in LaTeX had to do all that customization themselves.

For example, I'm in NJ and although I didn't go there, I could imagine Rutgers OIT telling people, 'If you want to use TeX, just download our package, it will install everything you need and will output the correct format for submission'

I wrote a book in Word. It was a nightmare, but a useful one: a version conflict across users or something in the copyediting phase glitch-deleted all the math from a chapter ... but in laboriously reconstructing them I found and fixed an error in the original. So thanks Microsoft?

On my old 486, I wrote about 80 page document about signal processing in Word, full of painstakingly created equations, until one day, all equations basically disappeared or became uneditable. I learned my lesson there about wysiwyg.

Things have improved since 1989. Give it a shot again, you might be surprised!

1999 and it doesn't seem like, from other answers.

The thing is that time invested in learning superior alternatives is already spent, and there's no point taking the risks just to try for no reason.

Just like I will not create another website in FrontPage.

They did completely overhaul the equation system in Office 2007 so that you edit them with unicode text instead of the proprietary OLE editor from previous versions. The document [1] describing how they use unicode characters to structure mathematical expressions is pretty interesting, even if you never touch MS Word again.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf

Word also supports LaTeX for equations! https://support.office.com/en-us/article/linear-format-equat...

The compilable C++ snippet certainly looks interesting. It answers the question I always had, about why some languages added unicode identifiers.

It doesn't look all that bad.

I wrote mine before word was really a thing. I used LaTex, and had to create my own style setup. It wasn't too difficult. I had programs generate EPS documents for inclusion of figures, resize jpg/png images, run the multiple pass latex compilation.

I am pleased to report that the makefile for my thesis still works, and generates close to the original doc, 20 something years later. I can barely open a 10+ year old office doc thanks to incompatibilities within the product.

Back in those days, word processors would not do complicated multi-line equations very well; type setting for print, display, etc. This was a problem for me.

To each their own though. I wound up writing some user manuals for products I developed in the late 90's in LaTeX as well. I've not used it much since.

True story:

E. Allen Emerson once came knocking at the unix cave door, complaining that his older papers, written in LaTeX, were formatting differently.

Upon examination, the only difference, literally, was that we had replaced the ancient 300dpi printers with less ancient 600dpi printers. And yes, CMR is a spindley little font.

I'm glad it worked out for you. I would have gone mad if I'd tried to write my dissertation in Word. (As it is, I'm, nearly a decade later, still a bit touched after trying to do much minor work involving lambda calculus in Word.)

Counterpoint:

I wrote a 200 page technical book in Word. After a couple days of customizing Word (few macros, hotkeys, customizing the styles to my liking), everything went well and I was able to do everything I wanted w/o trouble.

Word does have a learning curve (e.g. put all pictures inside a text box, it makes layout 10x easier), but once learned it is quite nice for a lot of purposes.

> Word does have a learning curve (e.g. put all pictures inside a text box, it makes layout 10x easier)

Woah, good tip! As I write more specifications and reports for management I'm using Word more, and there's a dearth of good advice online for getting decent results (it's drowned in Google by the "how to type a document" kind of guides).

Many times I've wished to write HTML and have it formatted like Word, as my styles go haywire.

Talking of styles, I'm surprised there's not a Syle interchange format for Style Sets - Microsoft's online resources don't have any to download. I was looking for a Latex-equivalent default template.

The closest you can get is templates. A blank document template with just styles setup does the job.

The text box thing is huge. I wouldn't be able to work in Word without knowing that.

Edit: Link! https://templates.office.com/en-US/Blank-and-General

I write in http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ then style it in LaTeX later. And I love it.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm now evaluating a bunch of my prior writing.... Eh that's a lot of red!

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