Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

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You don’t have to log in with O365 and office and windows can stand entirely alone and there is no requirement to be cloud connected. It all still works offline as a classic AD setup. You have to be an enterprise customer though. I literally have one of these on my desk. This is not a problem for state level organisations unless they are throughly incompetent at infrastructure provision.

As for libreoffice I throughly dislike it compared to MS software. I have opened reproducible bugs against it in bugzilla that have been there for over a decade with no solutions. I got fed up in the end and just walked.

Saying that I dislike office packages entirely. They are a Swiss Army knife. Lots of mediocre tools in an inconvenient format but simple enough for the lowest denominator of poorly trained staff to use. We can and should do better. I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring and dedicated software to replace spreadsheets (all open source tools). The only remaining spreadsheet I have is personal finance which I can’t find a better solution for.

As for cloud we just send PDFs around and collab on GitHub so O365 is dead for us anyway.

> I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring

I tried and found it the weirdest language (BrainFuck aside) I ever seen. Sure you can copy-paste-modify it to do something similar to what everyone does but doing anything atypical seems prohibitively hard.

I really miss a modern (first-class Unicode to begin with, also more intuitive while more rich and less verbose than HTML+CSS) human-oriented typesetting language. Perhaps it's time to invent what MarkDown is to HTML but to SVG.

> As for cloud we just send PDFs around

Can MS Office make hybrid PDFs the way LibreOffice does (embed the source document into the PDF)?

Well it all makes a lot of sense but you have to understand it first. That takes time. I’m typesetting stuff which has complex mathematics in it so there are no better solutions. This is the best human solution we have.

There are some workflows that you can’t do with anything else as well. For example I am doing a lot of semi hand drawn diagrams on my iPad in Goodnotes. These are exported as vector PDFs and trimmed and included in the LaTeX documents as figures. They are fully vector end to end which is a complete pain in the ass on any other package.

As for hybrid PDFs I don’t know. I am mostly interested in not shopping the source document.

https://github.com/typst/typst looks promising, both the language and the tooling. I wonder where it will find its place in a world that is dominated by either Word or LaTex.

A lot of the office stuff can be handled by templates that allow only editing relevant parts - there's not really a need for majority of office workers to have access (and needing to know) all the features of an Office suite.

Over two decades ago I was tasked doing a pilot with IBMs Document Connect for Lotus Notes - it was clear that it pretty much was an Alpha they've been selling us, but it was showing promise. In the end it went nowhere, probably because not too many other companies were interested in trying out a different approach at handling their documents.

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