* I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178
As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to write a complicated markdown table.
> writing should happen in "word processing software"
Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. I am comfortable in same editor where I write code.
> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process.
To all the people who say "Writing markup in an IDE sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use it properly". I can write in a flow and apply/change formatting easily. I can jump around and rearrange documents with ease. And it is in a format that can be opened and read by native software on almost any computer.
If you think that Jack Kerouac would prefer MS Word over a much simpler plain text editor, I don't agree.
For that particular context of text.
I write my code, notes, text and emails in vim. Some in markdown. But to this day, I still miss the incredible usability of LyX 1.x when writing pure long-form text.[ß] I could force all writing to occur within central 60% of the editable screen height [doable with vim but not as cleanly]. No whitespace or formatting issues, ever - set the document defaults according to my liking and it would feel "just right".
Proper rendering and visually correct editing of math formulas as part of text. Oh my. Fond memories of being able to type '<raw latex hotkey>\frac' and continue fitting in the values...
If it had had vim's search-powered navigation, it would have been nearly perfect. LyX 2.x was a step up in visual appeal and two steps down in raw usability. I've since picked up writing raw latex where I need good formatting, just because I could not make LyX 2.x bend to my taste anymore.
ß: Back on early 2000's, I wrote a book in LyX. As well as all my university course papers, including the master's thesis.
That's not a prerequisite for the Latex folks, in my experience :D
(I'm also in the "wrote my masters thesis in word, including the fair number of equations" group)
But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare. Sometimes fastest way to work with the science text or documentation in a Word document is to hire a freelancer to retype all the text in LaTeX or something else.
It's a kind of Trolley problem: sometimes Word fanboys, unfortunately, _should_ suffer to let all the team get the job done.
Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)
It doesn't scale. At all.
I used to work at a university lab group where all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page, heavily technical reports with lots of diagrams and tables spanning pages. To be clear, most of the time all of us were working on the exact same huge document.
Word's version tracking stood no chance. Formatting was regularly off, tables were breaking apart, diagrams misplaced. Syncing was extremely bad, often with entire paragraphs in changes going missing, other times deleted portion were reappearing, all that jazz.
LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad) on the other hand, despite its archaic way of working, never showed any of those problems. If a table was placed somewhere, we could be sure it would never get moved to random places, and changes/rewrites would be always synced correctly (as LaTeX source is plain text, merging algorithms/CRDTs have a much easier time).
As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.
> LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad)
I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in LaTeX (physics) so I know how fantastic it is. You write content without caring for the container - and since changing anything is black magic you give up and do not try (which is a VERY good thing - it just works).
I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.
The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.
Indeed Google Docs is much better - we also used that - but it's still a WYSIWYG editor, which IMHO it translates to 'extremely hard to enforce style'.
> I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.
Yep, Overleaf was what we used. Its paid version was very much like Google Docs but on a plaintext editor wrt. to concurrent access. It could even do change tracking, comments, all the jazz, even Git synching (which we used for backups and CI)
> The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.
I'm curious as to why. If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not? When I joined, I didn't know the language at all, but that wasn't a problem-one would learn on the job.
It really depends on the company. I worked (and work) in large high-tech companies and whenever I tried to introduce something like Markdown I quickly hit he wall of non-technical people who did not want to try a new system. They new Word, were suffering with Word but did not have the mindset to give a try to something different.
For the ones on Google Docs it was even more difficult because, arguably, Google Docs is a really neat product for collaboration.
My teams use Markdown for all text (either Obsidian or internal wikis) but this is because they are good in what they do and that they fear their management line :) :) (just kidding)
Anyway, Word «collaborative» features are so much worse than git repository and pull requests! And even you need to collaborate with some extremely non-technical folks, in the case of LaTeX they still use add comments to the PDF file — and this workflow is still way more productive than editing the same Word document.
Other reasons to not to use Word in collaborative pipelines are already mentioned in neighbor threads.
We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minutes out of their day to learn the basics of a tool they use professionally.
It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to copy-paste, except it tangibly makes my day worse.
BTW, when I said tech people, I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.
Personally I find LaTeX misses the mark. Too much markup is needed and it detracts. I'm a fan of asciidoc though. I just wish the templating was a little better though.
For those not in the know, Simon Peyton Jones is one of the originators of Haskell, and sort-of-but-not-quite BDFL of Haskell... and he uses Comic Sans for all his presentations because it filters out people who will complain about font choice for a presentation.
https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf-current/Basics....
[1] https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
To be fair, for a significant number of things LaTeX is the better environment, even with it's own issues.
I come from a trades background and am now in the academic field (teaching and admin for my trade) and I would really like to do some professional development in this area. Also excel! I know I’m lacking and it would help my long suffering director haha.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/make-a-document-r...
[0]: Not a rhetoric question that implies one answer to be the only "right" one.
I'm either working on a document for myself or with collaborators.
In the first case I'll use markdown for simple things or LaTeX for bigger things since I can work in a familiar environment where I work most efficiently (VSCode).
In the second case, I'll work with collaborators so I will never be able to trust that a document I have sent off for reading is still consistently formatted when I receive it back. This means that any benefits of the collaboration tools (eg. review history or suggesting changes) are wiped off the table. I will have to integrate any suggested changes into my own authoritative version of the document by hand anyways. At that point I may as well work where I fell comfortable and use markdown / latex, and send off Pandoc converted word files for comments by others when it is relevant.
This is of course for serious pieces of writing, not throwaway stuff like eg. meeting notes, but for those Google docs is plenty.
Word (and similar text processors) is a toolset. All it gives you are tools. Word lets you define formatting rulesets, lets you apply formatting rules and create rulesets from applied rules.
Some evangelists may say that "safe" text processor would only allow application of rulesets, because direct application of rules leads to "spaghetti formatting". However that is one of the powers of WYSIWYG text processors: you apply the rules and extract those to rulesets once you are satisfied with results, in an explorative way. Direct application of rules is a feature that makes Word what it is.
Now, if a user takes a document with predefined rulesets and still applies their own rules inconsistently that's simply misuse of the tool.
I don't think discussion around fault is meaningful in such scenario altogether.
What would you prefer, instead? CTRL-C, CTRL-V? SHIFT-INS, CTRL-INS? some vim incantation?
As a select-to-copy/middle-click-to-paste guy, seeing people use these inferior alternatives looks extremely annoying to me.
I think they're equivalent and certainly both are better than using the right-click menu.
Using CTRL+C/V requires an unholy synchronization of mouse and keyboard. But unix-style middle-click paste is entirely mouse-controlled and very elegant. Of course, if you are inside a text file, you can use vim keyboard tricks that are even faster because you don't need to select the text.
You can select text with the keyboard by holding down the shift-key, and use the cursor-keys or use ctrl to efficiently jump by word-boundaries.
No mouse required.
From my experience Word from Office360 breaks complex formatting of desktop Word document even worse, than LibreOffice/Google Docs does.
Closest thing that I use is Google docs, sometimes.... The reason I use vim for everything now is - I use vim for everything.
I’m talking about the Microsoft product that is now sold under the Microsoft 365 Online brand.
It isn’t a perfect replacement but for the times I’ve used it, it’s been pretty good.
I've used Word professionally since the mid-1990s. I do know how to use it properly, and it still sucks.
"Writing" isn't meant to be done in a word processor, which was developed as a business tool, not a creative tool. Writing should be done in whatever tool one wants to write in.
Word is, be design, both a desktop publishing app and a secretarial tool. For book-length writing, it works poorly with long files, the file format is subject to corruption. The docx format is also proprietary and subject to Microsoft's whim; any conversion scheme is a hack (though Pandoc and many others do work adequately). Unless you learn the ins and outs of Word's style scheme (and sometimes even if you do) and follow it slavishly, formatting is often inconsistent and there's no certainty that the styles you apply to make your document to make it look a certain way ensure it looks that way on someone else's machine.
There's no doubt, though, that a Word-compatible word processor needs to be in every writers' toolkit, since it is the standard in the publishing world.
[0] https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm, scroll down or search for THE LONG-HAND PAGE METAPHOR.
Sort of.
It's a ZIP containing a collection of XML files. The actual content is a single file, but you need separate ancillary XML files for things like styles, links, headers/footers, numbering schemes and so on. Each with complicated namespacing and nesting rules and each file referencing items in the others.
The area where it is most at risk (for me personally in practice) is the lax handling of the file by Word itself. As a specific example there are nested XML elements where sibling child elements define properties on the main element, such as properties that define paragraph styles.
Being siblings they should be supported in any order, but in practice generating DOCX files and importing them into Word will fail for no obvious reason, until you reorder them in the raw XML (even though they are still at the same level in the hierarchy). Then they work.
In other words, it's less the 'spec' and more the MS implementation that makes it fragile. And different versions of Word can have different behaviour in that regard.
Kerouac used a typewriter, which is about as minimal as it gets before you drop down to pen and paper. Something like Word is full of distractions: fonts, section headings, various formatting options, etc.
If you really want to get into the flow of writing, do it like Kerouac: plain text editor that wraps words at whatever width is reasonable to you.
After you're done, then copy it into a word processor and apply your formatting rules. Or just stick with the plain text editor and use anything from markdown to tex.
Ultimately, though, use what you're most comfortable with! That's going to be different, sometimes, for different people. The idea that it's a "fact" that everyone should be writing in any particular way using any particular software is just nonsense.
The fact? Should? In "word processing software"? Why shouldn't it happen in "text editing software"? Writing produces text, after all.
When it's time to collaborate, I use Pandoc to turn it into docx and then I send it around and the final formatting happens in Word because that's the easiest for everyone to work with, but the "get the ideas down" phase works best for me in a more "minimal" editor with little formatting.
I love the idea of Quarto, and if I had that when I was in grad school, it would have made my life so much easier. The workflow I see for Quarto is that you can write your paper while you're doing the experimentation because the code is embedded with your thoughts. But in that case, you're mostly slowed down by the research process so it can be a little more clunky to get the writing done because you have time and you're iterating over ideas more than words in that phase. I'd use it now for work in the R&D phase, but I know I won't have a critical mass of collaborators to make it worth while.
There's also Typst which is the new kid on the block but seemingly very good.
It's a bit of a matter of perspective.
The distinction between looking at a document in markdown versus Word is a bit analogous to the distinction between looking at a movie in its textual form as a screenplay versus looking at a movie as a piece of video: Text is capable of abstraction in a way that video is not.
In the screenplay, it might say "table", but when the director translates it to video, the director will have to decide: What kind of table? What design? What period? What texture? Is there anything on the table?
None of these decisions matter to the construction of the story, so, for a screenwriter, it would be very distracting if they had to make all of those decisions just to be able to get "table" committed to the medium.
In Markdown you worry about text and nothing but text. But Word shoves a particular font in your face as soon as you're laying down the first letter, so, if you don't like Word's choice of fonts, you can either let it annoy you throughout the project, or you can start worrying about fonts right then and there, which will be a distraction. If you write Markdown in a code editor, then, presumably, you've already set up the code editor in a way that doesn't annoy you. And then your future self (or someone else entirely) can worry about the font.
It puts the header notation and style (like italic, etc) in-line. So does Typst or LaTeX, and I can't think of any typical stand-off examples for headers and such, but it does muddy the text in-line in that sense. It typically doesn't really slow down the writing, but if you're writing \# as comments for code, then don't have those wrapped in \`\`\`, you can get some problems.
pandoc and some other tools turn those scenes into a full screenplay.
Anyway, to work within your analogy, I would say that Word lets the write do a bit of a 'mockup' of the set with nearly 0 effort. Like "I want a table here", so 2-3 clicks and you have it. Then you can "let the director" take your mock up and flesh it out properly later. As a writing, it helps me to see the mock up of the product as a go, but I want that mock up to be effortless. And as I said above, I do some work up front to make sure that Word's mock up looks good (or good enough).
It's true that many document elements, such as tables, are easy to create in Word. This puts it over the edge into desktop publishing territory. In itself, that's not especially a bad thing, especially if your target is a printed file or a PDF. That still makes it a publishing tool, not especially a writing tool.
Have you tried Libre Office? I'd love to hear your opinion.
Now granted, if you're just hammering out words without any editing this doesn't matter, but I think almost every piece of good writing has had 3+ revisions.
Of course this is a personal preference, but my friends who do a lot of writing (and never used vim at all) still seem to prefer a distraction-free editor with a lot less features and a much less noisy UI for the actual writing.
In Excel, you click on the cell and see either e.g. the number or formula used to get the result you see.
In Word, well, it's just difficult to figure out exactly why a thing looks the way it does.
Can also use control+space to strip off any direct formatting.
2. Add formatting using preferred markup language
3. ???
4. Profit!
Seriously, though, writing prose in a simple text editor and worrying about formatting later is far less distracting than writing prose in a WYSIWYG word processor. Also, adding formatting using a markup language ends up looking far nicer far faster than using a WYSIWYG word processor.
However, I'm not sure that even with greater knowledge of Word's features, whether developers in general would come to like it.
Or maybe those people just have eyes which can spot the differences in spacing between documents created with different Word versions, the mediocre kerning, and a multitude of other typographical annoyances.
Even a website is easier to replicate exactly in another browser than a Word document to be replicated from scratch in a new version of Word. And if by some miracle you manage that, the end result will always look meh.
I used to teach how to write serial letters with Word to secretaries when I was in high school. I used to write VBA macros that call in and out SAP systems when I was a junior software engineer - because "I was young and I needed the money."™
Now I either write in Emacs or Sublime on a Linux box with 2 TB RAM, or in Overleaf (LaTeX collab Web application), and I say: "Word sucks", I shall be suffering no more.
Word does not exist in my operating system (except for QEMU), and nobody notices.
LaTeX creates beautifully typeset publications, and most day to day writing requires nothing more than plain text, which is the most durable format.
I think of this as another version of enshittification -- the acceptance of poor performance as the "standard".
And don't get me started on math equations in Word ...
"Word sux" because it takes forever to start up and I forget what I went there to type. It's like opening a jetbrains ide to take a quick note. The only time that's worth it is when I'm sitting down to write for several minutes at a time, which happens (maybe) once a quarter, vs 17 times a day for quick notes.
Now, you could argue that I just don't want what word offers, but that's what everyone means when they say something sucks. It doesn't do the thing they want (usually because the implementers made trade-offs for other things).
MS Word or markup in an IDE are not the only options.
I used to use Lyx quite a lot. The best of both worlds in many ways.
There are text editors which give you a simple UI than an IDE without the distractions and complexity of a word processor. I find Kate quite pleasant to write in.
There are distraction free writers editors (which will often save in wordprocessor formats) that exist only because a lot of people find wordprocessors are a "disaster for the creative process".
So, as it must be me not knowing, can you tell me why Word won't let me change table column size ~50% of the time (for the same table from the same source). Half the time autofit works (yay!), half the time it won't let me resize columns, neither by typing the number, nor dragging the invisible off-page divider (Microsoft should just make the transparency of off-page content 50%??), nor changing to draft view and dragging the actual dividers ... wtf is going on there? If I paste it into OneNote first then it fits ... sometimes, if I drag a column wider first (which it already rendered 5x the width OneNote did) then it will let me narrow it afterwards, what's that feature called AutoNoNarrowColumnRenderedIncorrectlyFiveTimes ExpectedWidth?? I'll just search the settings to turn that off ... oh wait!
These are the times I long for markdown, or 'reveal codes' ... MS Word has a lot of problems they could probably have fixed if they hadn't put so much effort into preventing interoperability. These sorts of issues were around 20 years ago when I stopped using Word, and 5 years ago when I restarted. Same asinine poorly implemented numbering and styles that are unintuitive, opaque, and ungainly ... and don't get me started on search! Multi-highlights? Sorry best I can do is "find next" with no find previous, no regex, ... you can do find in AutoText though, right, right? ... and all the AutoText and AutoCorrect gets saved in a single sensible format that's easily modified? ... Word changes the format of all windows when you open a new one too, just in case you thought the suck was restricted to within the window chrome ... and doesn't have always-on-top, and doesn't open windows in their last position, and ...
Doesn't suck ...???!
Whilst you're here, any ideas why OneNote eliminates footnotes so you can't cut-paste between Word and OneNote? I'm sure it's not flawed and I'm just holding it wrong, right ...?
Pandoc was a game changer for me. I picked up LaTeX equation editor pretty quick, and being able to write markdown was so much more pleasant in my mind.
It’s not perfect; tables are a pain still, but I have no desire to go back to Word.
I think part of it was that I had basically memorized all the keystrokes for the MathType editor, and most of them didn't work in the MS Equation editor, which annoyed me. Also, I had issues with parentheses formatting correctly but I suspect that's been fixed in the last 15 years.
Still, I really do prefer to work with Markdown in general. The Markdown -> Pandoc -> LaTeX rendering just ends up looking prettier in my opinion, and at this point I'm pretty useless in any editor that doesn't have Vim keystrokes. Pandoc irons out the parts of LaTeX that I really hate (the `` vs " being the thing that's given me the most headaches), while letting me drop into raw LaTeX when I need it; not even getting into the fact that there's just math stuff that (as far as I know) doesn't work in Word or MathType's equation editor (e.g. bussproof trees).
I do get pretty annoyed when people try and tell me that regular LaTeX is "just as easy" as Word, because even as someone who has a reasonably good handle on LaTeX I can say that is just not true. TeX is arcane and weird and annoying and inconsistent, and I don't blame people for using Word compared to it.
Uh, that's just like, your opinion, man.
You might be interested in Texmacs [1]. It is has a wysiwyg interface, and it handles nicely tables and mathematical equations. Also you can export documents to the latex format.
Or Scrivener. No Zotero plugin, though.
It depends on the person. The best way for me to write is on paper, on a desk with lots of empty space, with paper versions of all reference material.
I would like to quote this on a MonsterWriter landing page
markdown -> pandoc -> docx -> upload to google doc -> share
Gdocs would then really only need to support the same semantics with underscores, asterisks, octothorpe heading levels and title sizes.
# Hello *world*
## Math
$$x = 2 \cdot y^3$$
- foo
- bar
- baz
1. Yes
2. No
3. Maybe
---
Right Left Center Default
------- ------ ---------- -------
12 12 12 12
123 123 123 123
1 1 1 1
Table: Demonstration of simple table syntax.
pandoc -t html input.md | xclip -selection clipboard -t 'text/html'
Other than that, I strongly agree. Word is also de facto standard when you want others to open and edit your document.