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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the heads up. Would using LibreOffice be safer?

Yes, in the same sense that browsing the web with lynx is safer because there's no javascript to exploit. Some people even consider the lack of javascript to be a feature. If you're just opening documents for viewing/basic editing, you probably won't mind macros being missing. The bigger problem might be the inconsistent layout (and other compatibility issues) that you get.

LibreOffice fully supports a lot of macro features, so I'm not sure what you're refering to about "macros being missing".

LO supports some macros.

Also, I use Lynx/Links+ (and a upgraded Netsurf) because of those JS pests.

So far I can:

- Use pleroma (Mastodon) from https://brutaldon.online. Much faster than any JS bloated platform. Images are viewed externally from sxiv, nothing is lost.

- Search YT from Idiotbox and playing the video with mpv + youtube-dl.

- Read Medium/Tedium general news articles without bogging my CPU down. Links -g supports images.

- Comment here.

- For Reddit I use either TUIR or Gopher.

- I can avoid all malicious cookies too by setting a different config file for links and tunneling it thru torsocks.

For DOCX/XLSX files, you can use antiword/wv and convert the DOC/X file to RTF and then open it under Ted (a really lightweight WP), and sc-im plus gnuplot for spreadsheets. Much faster and secure.

On potentially malicious PDF's and PostScripts, convert them into DJVU and use DJView to read them.

Yes, but... as an author, I’m stuck using Word for working with editors and publishers. (I prefer to use Scrivener.) Using any other application is a bad idea due to incompatibilities. This isn’t theoretical. Change tracking is critical and the “mostly correct” support in other applications is not an acceptable compromise.

Do you use any wysiwyg features of word, or is it literally notepad+git with a UX/UI that people are familiar with? What's unusual about authoring, editing, and publishing such that Word is better than the alternatives? I can't imagine that publishers use Word beyond "ok thanks now I'll arduously convert it into the real format".

FWIW, I (as a programmer) would immediately disqualify any job candidate (except interns) who didn't understand why change tracking was important and know how to use one or more implementations of it. I imagine nearly all of the programmers on HN feel similarly. Explaining that change tracking is critical isn't an unusual claim.

From context, I don't think "change tracking" here is being used as a general category of programmers' revision control systems. When you're working with editors at publishing companies or magazines, you need document revision tracking. Embedded comments, being able to see changes the editor made and being able to accept, reject, or modify them. And your program needs to be able to do this in a way that makes round-tripping the document between you and the editor absolutely bullet-proof. If the editor is using Word (and they are), that means you either need Word yourself, or you need something that's so good at doing that round-tripping with Word that the editor doesn't notice you're using something else.

And, speaking as someone who really doesn't like using Word and has searched for various solutions, this turns out to be really hard. I haven't looked at LibreOffice in the last two or three years, I confess, so it may have solved this by now -- but neither it nor OpenOffice could consistently manage this. There are other word processors that don't even try. I eventually settled on using Apple Pages, which so far seems to manage this well enough that no editor has called me on it.

I can see people raising their hands to object to my assertion that the editor is using Word, because they submitted to a mathematical or engineering journal that accepts submissions in LaTeX. And, sure, there are meaningful exceptions out there, but I can assure you that if you peruse the submission requirements for virtually any non-technical publisher, they are going to either mention Word or just expect Word because it's the industry standard for manuscripts. It doesn't matter how much better any other system is -- Penguin Random House ain't gonna change their workflow to accommodate you.

I believe kayodelycaon is saying change tracking IS critical - specifically Word's implementation of it (aka "Track Changes"). Many authoring workflows I've witnessed heavily rely on all parties being able to see the changes made in a Word document.

Change tracking is a second class citizen in Word.

My question is, if change tracking is so important, why use Word instead of any of the dozens of workflows where change tracking is a first class citizen? I used git as an example in my post; git takes change tracking seriously, (it does _literally_ nothing else) Word does not. Why prefer Word when change tracking matters? The argument of "Change tracking is priority #1 so I choose Word" sounds a lot like "Gas mileage is priority #1 so I choose the Dodge RAM with like the biggest engine ever" to me. If change tracking is priority #1, why not... buy a Honda Fit?

> My question is, if change tracking is so important, why use Word instead of any of the dozens of workflows where change tracking is a first class citizen?

The simple answer is, and always will be, that it is what your editor uses.

I would prefer to use LaTeX for most of my published works. It allows me to be more precise in layouts, and do things that are just downright convoluted in Word.

But if the editor uses Word, then you don't have a choice. You're not changing the publishing house.

I've seen what a self-published author who is proficient LaTeX can do. The physical book is absolutely beautiful. I don't think Word could replicate it and only a pdf could capture it on a digital device. Your basic Kindle ebook is a bit more limited.

In a perfect world, you would be right. But people in publishing houses are really not technology-savvy, most of them can barely use Word. They’ve been using it for 20 years and they will not use something different. I once worked for a magazine where they did not even use Words change tracking, you had to write the changes into the text with a different color, and they didn’t want to hear that this was a stupid workflow.

Git is a generalized change tracking system. A domain-specific system might easily do better. (I've used Word's change tracking a little and it seems fine, with domain-specific features.)

Word's Track Changes and git are entirely different tools for entirely different purposes.

Track Changes is equivalent to the github pull request workflow. It's not meant to be a permanent record. If you want a permanent record, store a copy of the file somewhere. The lazy versioning method is to use your email. If you need an old version, search for it. :D

Because the task at hand is "interoperate with dozens of other people whom you don't control and who are all using Microsoft Word Track Changes feature". In that (extremely limited but important) sense, Track Changes is first class citizen and git and all other systems that aren't exactly that are second-class.

Because got does nothing else, not even provide a UI for WYSIWYG editing a doc.

If you have a great idea for a GitHub for Books, do it! You'll make a fortune from publishers

WYSIWYG is not relevant here. The structured document format, very much is. Chapters, footnotes, references, quotations, tables, etc. It's more like Org mode + TeX + git.

I guess I'm misunderstanding then. Word's core feature is wysiwyg. Word as a document format is necessarily unstructured - "hey I'm gonna increase the font size of this text over here by like 12 or 14 pts or whatever and switch it to center identation and write 'Chapter 3'" -- that's the 'killer feature' of Word that defines it. Structural stuff like the idea of chapters or version keeping are all secondary to the defining wysiwyg feature.

If the goal is structure+change tracking, it seems like switching from an unstructured document format to a format/combination of formats that provides structure+change tracking is an easy slam dunk. Structure and interoperability with version control systems are both first class features of latex. Structure and version control are secondary features of Word. ...Why?

One of the great epiphanies of engineering is that my "the" definining feature is not your "the" defining feature. Also that there is actually considerable depth to applications and industries outside one's own.

Word supports semantic structuring as well, and one can even disable direct styles manipulation.

As for why, industry standards.

How can you disable direct styles manipulation? I’ve looked for that feature and never found it (although in response I just gave up on Wod as a serious tool for anything beyond short letters)

Say more about what you can't seem to find here. The idea that Word is not a serious tool, or is not suitable for anything longer than a letter, is just laughably false given how widely used it is in pursuits orders of magnitude more complex than a letter to your Aunt Millie.

I'm being a LITTLE snarky, but I also am genuinely offering to help, if you want it.

Not the parent poster, but I believe he asked how you can disable direct (ad-hoc) styles manipulation? That's something I'm also interested in - my ideal Word document would be the one in which I define styles to be used and every paragraph uses exactly one of these styles and the user can't say "I'll make these few words 14pt just because".

For example, https://www.officetooltips.com/word_2016/tips/protecting_wor...

I believe another replier has noted how one may do that.

IIRC Word used to have an "outline editing" mode where normal visual styles were largely ignored and replaced with a uniform set of rendering styles. Its principal feature was the ability to fold nested structures (chapters, sections, etc) and easily reorder them.

It still does. The macOS version has it in the menu bar: View > Outline.

And if you disable it, some helpful co-worker will helpfully re-enable it and add a bunch of red text as "comments".

It sounds like you're not familiar with what Word's traditional strength over other word processors was, even back in the DOS version days: support for semantically meaningful structured documents + stylesheets to attach to those structures.

It's a big deal. I live in emacs for most of my writing and notetaking, but I love using Word to create structured documents for clients (e.g., implementation guidelines, etc) because it's easy and works very very well, and I don't have a weird toolchain on the back end of the process to produce something they can easily consume.

The tl;dr here is that it is incorrect to say that Word is a WYSIWYG editor only necessarily and only capable of unstructured work. Sure, lots of people only ever use it that way, but it has strong support for document structure and intelligent styling (to say nothing of internal change tracking), and this is what makes it a good (and popular!) choice for large-scale document work.

Indeed - a co-worker long ago introduced me to the power of references and if you deal with contracts or legal documents that reference other parts of a document nothing else comes close!

For the record, I am publishing stories, not writing code. To work with publishers, I need to use their format. That format is Microsoft Word. Specifically, the Windows or macOS versions of Word, _not_ the online or iOS versions. The only workable alternative I know of is Pages on macOS.

Word's Track Changes feature is used to show where an Editor or Author wants to make changes, ask questions, or make comments. If you do not use Word, you risk comments or changes going silently missing. Worst case, complete, irreversible corruption of the document. This is not theoretical, publishers have horror stories about authors using Libre/Open Office or incompatible versions of Word.

Word is very much the "real format" for most of the process. You may be thinking of typesetting, which uses different file formats depending on which application is used. As an author, I don't see that part of the process.

I mean, probably, but you'll also go nuts trying to any serious collaboration with true-Office people.

This attack only works if the user clicks 'enable macros' when the document is opened or when the "“Disable all macros without notification" setting is enabled (ironic) or if you are using Office 2011.

TL;DR: Looks like most of the exploits have been patched, and even still, if they hadn't been patched you probably would have been fine using later versions of office (at least in the context of the attacks outlined) if you don't open and run documents with macros and you don't have that setting enabled.

No it features a different exploit involving an ancient programming language in an ancient file format that they forgot when they added the notifications.

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