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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here seems to be missing an important detail and that is ppi. That 800x600 screen was probably running on a 14 inch monitor at an effective ppi of 70, with much larger text and clearly visible pixels. Take a 14 inch laptop and maximize the word processor and you’ll get a like for like comparison.

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Yes exactly. I definitely sympathize with the other complaints: the newer Word UI is pretty garbage (I truly do hate the ribbon bar). There is a bit extra padding in the newer UI. But really, it all comes down to the PPI which seems obvious.

What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful.

> What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful.

Word 9x was WYSIWYG also.

Word 97 could display the page in WYSIWYG style just as the newer version can. In fact, as I recall, that was its default setting. For some reason this person chose to take the comparison screenshot in the non-WYSIWYG mode.

It's not even non-WYSIWYG mode, this isn't like those text mode programs that preceded it where you have Latex-style markers everywhere and only ever see the formatted text in print (preview).

This just hides the page barriers to give you more space to type.

Most of the Word documents I've typed never even made it to paper so the only reason I didn't disable pages all together is that some of my school projects had page count requirements.

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