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Comment by asciimov | Hacker News Reader

If you want to be absolutely infuriated at the current state of technology, watch and listen to someone who uses a word processor all day for their job. My partner is in research publications, so much of their daily workflow could be improved if the various software packages could interact with each other.

Word can’t do layouts, so you gotta use some Adobe product for that, but some parts don’t let you copy in outside text, gotta retype it.

If you want to update a graph, instead of clicking on the chart to update the data you have to go through 3 or more programs to get a publication ready image.

Never mind there isn’t a git equivalent in the space.

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>Never mind there isn’t a git equivalent in the space.

Google Docs (or other online word processors) + revision history [0] works just fine as a distributed version control system for the vast majority of users.

[0] https://zapier.com/blog/google-docs-revision-history/

First Microsoft Word is the standard for industry. Everything you submit can be submitted by doc files.

Revision history, track changes, sharing, autosave backup, etc are all included into Word these days (with a corporate office sub anyway). And it does it's job.

However there is no standard tool like git in the publication space that everyone uses. There are dozens of competing tools, that all do a poor job of keeping a project together. Some important features being: tracking support documents, controlled sharing, revision history to multiple types of documents, bundled with an easy to use UX/UI.

git is one thing I've really wanted to introduce to my wife, who is an author, but she's so tied to Word and there's just nothing I've found that ties the two technologies together well (I have tried a couple options, but they were disappointing)

First and foremost, it's unlikely that most professional authors would need to use another tool for writing in addition to Microsoft Word. I haven't used Microsoft Word in over a decade; I've been using Linux and Google Docs for about a decade. I hate Microsoft, but I try to be realistic.

Nonetheless, Google Docs is a much better tool for most ordinary users than Git. With Google Apps Script you can easily use Google Docs as a CMS (content management system).

If indeed your wife actually needs to use Git, instead of teaching your wife markdown, make a bunch of customized headings and explain to her she must not use all of the formatting options in Google Docs.

Techies often tend to try to convert ordinary people to "techie technology." It is usually a mistake.

Yes, Google Docs is probably better for most ordinary users.

It's not nearly as good at merging complicated histories as git, and doesn't help you keep commits atomic when working with multiple files. But that's seldom much of an issue with human language texts.

Google Docs' suggestion feature is probably better than reviewing pull-requests for normal people. Its ability to let multiple people edit the document at the same time can be really great (but would be crazy to do when editing source code).

Hmm.

On Linux, you could turn on autosave, then tie it in with a short script for inotify + auto checkin + update.

Very messy I guess, would probably be easier to write a patch for libreoffice, tied into undo/redo edit history.

Seems like a killer feature for some people. Infinite rollback.

Would work best in an optional separate window, so you could copy historic text back in.

Windows has a built-in file history feature. You can customize folders to backup to a network drive or connected drive:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/file-history-in-...

MacOS also does the same via Time Machine.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mh15136/mac

Other options are Google Docs (the editor has version history support) and cloud storage services that support versioning (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc).

this is literally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 all over again. just use dropbox, they have file history.

My second part (OOo tie in), would be too much in this case.

Imagine a full file upload every change.

Instead, having a git style history for edits, right in OOo would be awesome. Maybe a ${filename}.hist file for each file.

You could exclude this from git/svn/dropbox whatever backups too, so only purposeful saves get sent upstream.

The GUI interface, its nuances would be key here.

Imagine being able to open the history window, scroll to, or search text of all changes, then click and be taken to the location in current document, with a placement option once there.

That's next gen history, and gp is right, why isn't this a thing?

pandoc (https://pandoc.org) might help. It can read and write DOCX, convert it to a plain text format of your liking.

I recommend to be wary of changing someone else's workflow, however. Particularly if it is someone you live with. Unless the other wants to change their workflow, they won't accept it. And if something goes awry, you're the first person they call, and make responsible to resolve the issue NOW. For example, when stuff breaks a day before a deadline, you know what you'll be spending that day on :-)

If you manage the documents on OneDrive, you can use the document revisioning on OneDrive. (GDrive has it too, I think, for that matter)

Would latex or markdown work for her?

I did most of my nursing school papers in LaTeX after finding APA7 formatting and citations difficult to comply with on a short deadline. I found that the headaches of the tools and of learning the many small packages far outweigh the benefits of separation of layout and content, and I've since uninstalled TeX Live. For anyone less inclined to tinker, I hope that the process of installing TeX Live would scare them away before the damage can be done. If the default behavior of a package manager is to download the entire repository, it's a sign of serious issues with the ecosystem.

EDIT: Markdown on the other hand is far too simple to format formal writing. It was never the intention of Markdown to be that.

> EDIT: Markdown on the other hand is far too simple to format formal writing. It was never the intention of Markdown to be that.

Here are some Markdown documents I've written and/or typeset using ConTeXt:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

* https://www.docdroid.net/VQU9VEZ/design-pdf

* https://www.docdroid.net/rHlVyPV/autonoma-pdf

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

My Typesetting Markdown series[0] does a deep dive into how to keep content and presentation separate, which is much easier using ConTeXt than LaTeX, IMO. Part 8 of the series delves into typesetting annotations. As for TeX Live, I agree. The instructions for installing ConTeXt on Windows is basically: download, unzip, run two batch files.[1]

[0]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/

[1]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Installation

Your work is spectacular. In particular that first link is striking. Unfortunately your series loses me with how it introduces the build system first rather than tools. That is not a trivial shell script or toolchain for me, and certainly is too much for someone looking for a Word replacement. Looking at further pages, it becomes less Markdown and more a home-grown formatting system that has Markdown as a subset.

That said, ConTeXt looks great for my purposes! So much more is done out-of-the-box, the documentation is well-laid out, and I can see looking at its main pages how I could set up formatting for a style guide myself, unlike LaTeX. Thank you.

> That is not a trivial shell script or toolchain for me, and certainly is too much for someone looking for a Word replacement.

Absolutely. I developed KeenWrite[0], a free and open source desktop editor, to replace those shell scripts with a graphical user interface and command-line interface[1]. There are several starter themes you can use, as well.[2]

[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/cmd...

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/

Those are outstanding examples, and should put to paid any assertions that Markdown cannot be used for serious work.

I'm seeing you'd submitted an eight-part series, "Typesetting Markdown", first part here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20003913

That got no traction on HN, but I'd love to see that included as a 2nd-chance pool or submitted feature.

I would think for research publications the tool for the job is latex? It can handle all the issues you listed at least.

Plus, LaTeX is very compatible with using Git for version control, even more so if you can come up with some way (an intermediary script, a git extension, or pure discipline) to ensure that Git sees every sentence as a different line.

Industry standard is Word Documents, EVERYBODY accepts doc files. (Unless you are doing layouts then it can be a handful of other tools)

Always an option to write in latex and use pandoc to get a doc file for distribution. At a certain point word documents get pretty unwieldy.

I would think for research publications the tool for the job is latex?

Only a small subset of the research world uses LaTeX.

Why is someone working in research publication not using a typesetting engine like tex?

Incidentally, git supports non-wysiwyg typesetting just fine.

If you don't have lots of math to type, I don't think TeX is all that great?

In any case, almost no one apart from Knuth uses TeX anyway. At least not directly. Almost everyone uses some kind of macropackage like LaTeX.

For most people, markdown would probably be the saner input format than anything TeX derived?

(And I use and like LaTeX.)

> Incidentally, git supports non-wysiwyg typesetting just fine.

If you add custom diff and merge handlers, git should be able to support wysiwyg, too.

There's also LyX, which is sort-of like wysiwyg, but produces LaTeX output. Git would handle the produced LaTeX just fine, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX

> Why is someone working in research publication not using a typesetting engine like tex?

Research Publications is more than just Academia. The de facto standard in industry is Microsoft Word. Everyone accepts word docs and expects to receive them. Sure, some publications take tex family documents, but not all. Why use a tool not everybody takes.

Git is too obtuse of a tool to get not programmers to use.

That seems crazy to me. Word produces such ugly documents (poor line breaks, poor kerning, poor quality rendering, etc.). I would never publish something formatted in word just on an aesthetic basis, not to mention the downsides of using a propriety format without a proper typesetting engine.

Basically different publications have different style guides or templates. Some places you do the type setting, others do it for you. Eventually the text ends up as a pdf, and then that is marked up for corrections, revised, and approved for publication.

You also have people of various skill levels using these docs. From MD/PhDs and lawyers all the way down to secretaries with high school diplomas. The only ubiquitous application between them is Microsoft Word.

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