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Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer

It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).

Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.

My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.

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> My bet is on Google Docs style,

Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion.

Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion".

I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that.

The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion

EDIT: "porn list" -> "list porn"

I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life.

I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages, are game changers when you're trying to manage a large collection of information.

Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm not sure whether this is literally true or just something about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it makes a difference.

As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's not very good at handling cross-block selections, using cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor, but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put some energy into this.

I preferred notion initially, for many of the same reasons you outlined, but eventually I just couldn’t stand how slow notion is. Google Docs is so much faster.

I’m interested to try Google’s new tables product when I get a chance.

Second this comment - notion would win for me hands down if it wasn't slow. Unfortunately I don't have the capital or desire to upgrade to an M1 to fix notion. So maybe when I eventually upgrade my system it will be my go to. Fingers crossed.

I had a similar feeling a while ago - but revisited Notion after a year or so and they've made a lot of speed improvements to it!

A couple of months ago, I got a Apple M1 and a lot of these electron apps load much snappier. (Slightly impractical fix)

> cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet,

I'm not in the business but I did once spend two weeks of my life QA'ing just bulleted list copy-paste edge cases for a content-editable based WYSIWYG wiki editor and I would like that time back thank you very much.

> Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why.

There are fewer formatting options, but the options given are very opinionated. It is also really good at responsiveness to screen size.

For certain type of softwares, there is no fear of "not adopting". Text and document software is one of them. Every tool has their own offering and nothing makes them obsolete.

Let's say, text editors. In the last 2-3 years we have been told AI driven auto-complete or code companions will "disrupt" the entire experience of writing text and code. Before that we had the plugin saga of VSCode and Jetbrains and what not telling us more features means more convenience. Before that we had GUI and cursor based text editors that were simple to use. Before that we had VI and emacs.

But is there any kind disruption? Not really. People still like what the use and feel comfortable with. They don't need to switch environments but they can comfortably add features that they think is necessary. For people who are comfortable with Vi text editor the process is Vi > VIM > Neovim and not Vi > Notepad++ > VSCode > Github Copilot.

porn list?

I think GP's "porn list people" means "people who really like lists (as if lists are pornography to them)"; see meaning 3 and 4 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English.

I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn people".

Not OP, but thanks for clarifying. It's early this Friday morning and I was wondering why Notion worked well for "porn" lists.

1. Pornhub 2. Uh…

I hope they meant list porn and English isn’t their native tongue. In the sense of people who get pleasure from making lists. Porn list people would imply people who make lists of porn which doesn’t fit the context.

Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured.

It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.

> It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend

Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog.

One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.

Off topic: any updates on the development Notion communicated 3 years ago about creating Page Level Defaults?

https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104

It sure would be nice if I could make all pages "small text" and "full width".

You are right. I’ve been in Notion heavy companies almost since its launch, and I’m not sure I ever tried to print a page ever.

Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember: straight making the page public when it was open information, or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the partner.

I think instinctively anything “serious”, like a legal contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.

I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.

I wish.

One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web)

PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.

> PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document

I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.

What you're talking about is a failure in the "addressability" section of the digital media rubric. It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was before.)

I’m thinking specifically as using PDFs as an archival format to snapshot the state of a document at a moment in time. PDFs are inherently page-based (well, at least in the way they are commonly used in business, I know they could be any dimension, but that’s still a “page”).

It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary.

However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling.

So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.

Your comment sent me off on a mental tangent for a minute about what it would take to create a PCF - portable canvas format

I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML!

Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.

A full single-file archival HTML file would really get you pretty far in the regard (embedded CSS, no JS, data/base64 images). You might even convince me that JS is okay if needed to render the page, but a static dom would be better.

All the things you said about PDF are true. You can say other true things, like that it's true that PDF gives these nice archival properties and that at the same time it's true that PDF begins with the letter P. Nevertheless, it doesn't make sense to conclude that what you want from an archive format is for it to begin with the letter P. That PDF simulates physical pages (versus not) is similarly beside the point.

I never quite understood why PDFs are considered to be fixed baked references.

Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from designers.

Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and audit logs or checksums.

Sure, but the particular PDF I emailed you is immutable (by me). It's sitting in my Sent folder and your Inbox folder in our respective email clients, and we can both be sure what it said.

Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion.

I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.

Culture mostly, turns out that little barrier to editing makes PDF practically immutable for non-secure uses.

Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).

Have you been to Japan? Everything involves more paper than Europe in 2000.

It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.

In remote life I started printing anything long and complicated I needed to read just to give my eyes a break from screens all day.

Is it becoming niche? Yeah, probably, but we might want to think of it as being niche in the way that accessibility features are niche.

That's one of the reason why I'm so happy with my Boox e-ink tablet.

Anytime I need to read big documents I just export them and put it on it. Easy for the eyes and easy to take note on the document.

I haven't actually printed a document in years, but I export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with enterprise customers, it's far more reliable to share a PDF than to share a link to a document which is often restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules on their side.

Submitting assignments as pdf’s is extremely common at Universities. It feels like literally everything needs to be a pdf.

Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.

I don't recall the past time I tried to print any document. And given that I don't own a printer and haven't been to the office in years, it must've been a while.

That's the point though. If you frequently have to convert documents to PDF or print them then you shouldn't be using Notion. Not having to worry about these use cases gives these news apps a huge amount of flexibility to evolve their UX. Otherwise every single document editor will continue to look and work like Word, as they have done for the last 30 years.

Use cases? I just want exactly what I have in notion… but printed to pdf. How is that taking away from “evolving their UX”.

Export ignores filters on database views! -_-"

Haven't printed a document in four years now. I think the number of people who print is getting smaller and smaller.

What's the benefit here?

Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone.

Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner.

But it doesn't seem like a big change...

When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc.

So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me.

How big a change was it to implement? I don't know.

Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too.

I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.

I didn't think about the costs of implementing it, but that it seems to be an discussion worthy topic here on HN.

But I don't understand why.

Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?

Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google!

So yeah, I welcome this change big time.

I didn't like the page breaks either, but I never had big issues with them.

It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion

The last time I printed something written on google docs was probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume

Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.

Thanks for your insights, that's really interesting. Also, if you are putting the same amount of attention to detail and focus on pragmatism over beauty that Zoho Mail uses, I think you'll kill it. I'm by no means dogging on Zoho Mail, I think it's good looking. But the reason I love it is that it's loaded with features/settings, and it's done in a way that is intuitive and highly usable.

No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer

A tangential question on Zoho Writer: why isn’t there any information on pricing (or a statement that it’s free)? I looked for pricing links. I even went to the resources page and searched for pricing and found no results. The very first thing I need to know when looking at an online platform is what kind of lock-in exists, how I can safely try it out and how much time I should invest in trying it out. The Writer pages don’t help me in this regard. I’m on mobile using Firefox Focus, if at all this happens to be a browser and/or ad blocker issue.

Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page because the app itself is free for individuals (along with a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email account right away and start using.

We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/

It's "free"... but as a SaaS office suite, the documents (along with any attached images, etc) are stored in the cloud. And if you're not paying for WorkDrive, then the storage limits (if any?) are not really documented or clear at all.

I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers. But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and limitations are.

GP here: it would be a good idea to include this information directly on the product page.

Because you have to buy one of their bundles to get this product, these are the ones I found:

https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html

https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/

Looks like a nice site!

One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response

FYI Zoho it is not only a nice site, they have 12k employees (per Linkedin) :)

I just hope the industry doesn't "move on" from print-focused word processing and start treating it like a second class citizen. Some of us target actual print: Books, technical manuals, posters, pamphlets, brochures, etc. and Docs is still basically decent "poor man's desktop publishing". Trying to layout a document for print when you don't have WYSIWYG page boundaries is a nightmare.

I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting.

My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet, I don't even think it's possible.

But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain text documents had existed for decades and would continue to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF format were so great that it was eventually standardized.

There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no idea how Google is representing your data, or if there even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if there is one on the server side, AFAIK you can't get it). I'm not very familiar with Notion, but it seems like it's probably the same way. That means there's no chance of "Google Docs" or "Notion" becoming a standardized format. At least with a proprietary standalone format you (or the community) has a chance at reverse engineering it.

I agree, that's true currently. But if Google achieves sufficient dominance, it could be in their interest to release such a format.

> legal professionals

I would love to meet these mythical legal professionals that use anything other than track changes in docx. :D

Don't forget passing around Excel documents. I'm not a lawyer, but I've read accounts of this from enough to think it's a whole thing and not an isolated phenomenon.

I agree. I have over 50 US patents, and the multitude of patent lawyers I have worked with all use docs with change tracking enabled.

EDIT: parents -> patents

>I have over 50 US parents

I feel for you, my kids have two US parents and they find them to be quite the pain in the ass. :-)

:-)

Not to mention that having any kind of client-related document on an online service like Google that's indexing the content (at the least) is probably a violation of attorney-client privilege.

<sigh> I guess I'm old fashioned but I really like being able to print things (even if sometimes not to real paper).

eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation.

Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers).

Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape.

And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain.

Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.

Just a vote for Zoho. It's a really impressive collection of integrated business tools. I keep discovering new things every time I check it out.

The breadth of Zoho apps is incredible, the price is unbeatable, but the quality is bad enough to make it not worth it, as of late 2019.

I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019.

What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.

Is your criticism limited to the CRM tool? I've had nothing but great things to say about Zoho, but I haven't used the CRM tool. Are your criticisms for Mail?

My criticism is all the "business" apps – CRM and Desk were the central pieces.

I haven't used the Mail app. My teams used Google Workspace for email etc.

Not from document to block, but from XML-based into database-based.

Try to open a Word document with a zip program, all you will see is a lot of folders with XML and blob images.

Latex and Word is XML. Notion is database.

The benefit of database: History, scale better, multiple users, merge text as diff is simpler +++

Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to the XML model again?

XML is a document. A relational database is a relational database. Both can be used to create a tree structure. Notion does it wit a "block" table, each block having a parent block id, and a list of child block ids, allowing tree traversal in both directions.

Once you're into a relational model you can start treating your forest of trees as a big graph if you want to (though you don't have to). And you can edit nodes individually without having to iterate the entire document.

But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure you still have many of the same issues. Each node will need to entail the context of its parent, which means that you'll need to know things like transitive closures in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g. deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create pointers below it? And tracking history could get complicated because it might span both the content of the node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a change where the text was bold and a block was moved around). Where do you put transactions?

I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun problem to solve!

XMl is format, not a document. XML can be used to express whatever data structure you want. For the user it has little meaning whether the backend is using xml, json, a sql- or nosql-database. The interface and workflows are hiding it all away.

How is Latex XML?

ismorphic to xml. it's markup. not structured data

Pretty sure database is also isomorphic to XML, in that sense. I agree that Notion-ish documents are more structured than Word-ish, though.

A SQL database, with indexing configured correctly, allows you to look up a row in O(log(n)).

A bag of XML bytes doesn't give you that. It takes, at best, a SAX parser to do an O(n) scan through the whole document to find stuff. Most DOM implementations give you O(1) indexing by ID, but they require you to parse it first, and that's going to take O(n).

Creating a database is >= O(n).

While creating and editing a database, it is SOP to create/maintain and save data structures that provide fast access later.

Is there some reason why you couldn't do the same for XML?

The problem isn't creating the XML file. The problem is querying it later, after you've dumped it from RAM to disk, you have to load the entire thing off disk back into RAM in order to rebuild the DOM.

A database like SQLite allows you to perform structured queries at faster-than-O(n) speed straight off the disk.

Is there some reason why you can't save the DOM or other datastructures that you help you query/manipulate the XML?

A database isn't a set of flat-file CSVs even though that's all that is actually needed to do everything that people do with databases (albeit one operation at a time). (The data may be normalized but the datastructures aren't necessarily.) Instead, a database is data together with some data structures (and relevant code) that are maintained to speed up operations on said data.

Why can't one persist auxillary datastructures for XML, including (but not limited to) the DOM?

TeX is a Turing complete programming language. It’s nothing but data and calls to subprograms.

Well with GP's logic, a C program is isomorphic to XML because it can be parsed and then the parse tree serialized as XML.

"Word" Except Word has had a pageless equivalent since Word 97, probably prior.

It doesn't really feel that impressive or new age to include a basic and imo required feature from the competitor so very very late!

Good luck with the whole zoho suite. We could all use some alternatives.

Is there some sort of consensus on why Google hasnt really made a real effort to compete with MS Office?

Maybe Microsoft didn't like the results of the OLE era and decided embedding wouldn't work for enough users.

It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and previous) is spreading, do you agree ??

Loop is an interesting app, rendered entirely pointless for me by the fact that I cannot share it outside of my organisation :(

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