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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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