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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

Most tech people who use Word know how to use it and that is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back because others don't even know that styles exist and use manual / direct formatting instead.

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.

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Good point, sigh...this is so true. I have created a 45 minute tutorial of 'how to use word properly' to address this exact pain point. I send a link to my students if their first draft commits any 'sins'.

BTW, when I said tech people, I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

People use things like LaTeX exactly because of this problem. Word processing software brought the problem of inconsistent formatting and layout within the grasp of everyone and boy! ...did they grab it with both hands. Systems based on plain text allow the author to concentrate on content only, without the need to format.

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.

TeX documents have a distinctive look because of their typography. Back when printed resumes were a thing, whenever I saw one done in TeX, I would recognize the CM font right away. I'd then look at the resume early, since I knew that it came from a nerd. Mine was of course also done that way.

Unless you’re looking for Haskell nerds, in which case you should prioritize Comic Sans.

Simon PJ glares :)

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.

I write code in Comic Sans, so I'm not one to judge :)

There is also Coq's documentation system, which has its own distinctive look:

https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf-current/Basics....

It's ideal for hiring - you immediately know which resumes to read and which one to dump into the trash.

I wouldn't dump a non-TeX one in the trash. It's just that a TeX one tends to draw my interest right away.

So CVs from folks who know LaTeX good enough to change Computer Modern to something else will be dumped into the trash…

My personal sweet-spot for writing technical documents these days is Asciidoctor with semantic line breaks [1]. There are some warts in the asciidoc syntax but it covers a lot more of the features I need for the types of documents I'm writing compared to Markdown.

[1] https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/

> I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

To be fair, for a significant number of things LaTeX is the better environment, even with it's own issues.

Would you mind sharing that link? I completely understand if you’d rather not for privacy reasons though! If not could you recommend a different tutorial?

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.

Is there a way to lock documents in some way, so that direct formatting is disallowed and only styles work? Not that we could truly lock a document, but at least having some sort of header that lists allowed features, such that one would get a warning whenever they veered off course?

Don't think such fine grained control exists. There is read only mode[1], which (I assume) limits the reader to only comment.

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/make-a-document-r...

Sometimes direct formatting is the correct choice, such as when applying bold or italics to individual words or sentences within a paragraph. Making a separate style for those is lunacy!

Yes. Protect document and then select limit formatting to a selection of styles. Can’t remember the exact name of the checkbox.

So what you're saying is that the problem with Word is that it makes it easy to write unpolished and unprofessional documents? In your opinion, is that the fault of the word processor or the user? [0]

[0]: Not a rhetoric question that implies one answer to be the only "right" one.

I find that question uninteresting, because no matter where the fault lies (it's probably somewhere in the middle) the end consequence is that there is no use case where it makes sense for me to use Word (unless I'm literally held at gunpoint).

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.

IMO entirely user.

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.

But what of the potential lack of a compatible toolset on the other end of this pipeline? Even embedding styles in a Word document offers no assurance the document will appear as you intend when they receive it, much less if they offer edits and comments and send it back.

I don't get your point. Since IIRC Office 2007, docx is the default format which is designed for compatibility. IIRC it allows embedding of fonts and other non-text content, making compatibility concerns an edge case. If all parties use relatively recent version of MS Office with overlapping featureset, there should be no compatibility concerns, unless somewhere in the collaborative pipeline you are departing Office ecosystem altogether.

I don't think discussion around fault is meaningful in such scenario altogether.

> It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to copy-paste

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 that depends if your workflow is oriented around the keyboard or the mouse. For me it is keyboard oriented and I frequently use (Ctrl)+Shift+Arrows for finegrained selection anyways so Ctrl+C/V is most convenient. I also use Vimium in my browser. If my workflow was mouse oriented I'd instead use Gesturefy.

I think they're equivalent and certainly both are better than using the right-click menu.

I don't always use the mouse, but when I do, I only use the mouse, no keyboard needed at all.

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.

> Using CTRL+C/V requires an unholy synchronization of mouse and keyboard.

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.

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