Hacker News Reader

I remember how promising AbiWord (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbiWord) and GNUmeric (http://www.gnumeric.org/) were 20 years ago when I first started using Linux and FreeBSD. Back in 2004, OpenOffice was slow on my hand-me-down PC running a 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor and with only 64MB RAM, but AbiWord ran well; it was a nice, lightweight word processor that was decently compatible with Microsoft Word for my needs as a high school student who needed to turn in essays and other reports. I've never tried GNUmeric, but I remember people singing its praises back in 2004.

I haven't heard anything about AbiWord and GNUmeric in recent years, though. I haven't kept up with them since my college days.

It is sad to see these projects disappear in obscurity. But what other outcome is even possible? It is incredibly expensive to build such complex software. these projects do not have an adequate amount of funding. There’s just no way random developers can devote years of their life to something like this and not earn a living. Even if they did, it would take at least 1000 of them for each of these products to rival commercial ones.

This is one of the reasons why I'm curious about Alan Kay's STEPS project, which attempted to build an entire desktop environment in just 20,000 lines of code via the use of bespoke domain-specific languages (https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf). Building feature-rich software applications using conventional technologies is very labor-intensive, but one of the things I'm curious about is whether the combination of DSLs to define subsystems and the promotion of component-based software (a la Apple's OpenDoc strategy from the mid-1990s before Steve Jobs' return; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E for a very 1990s video) could reduce the cost of writing software that meets modern expectations regarding functionality.

It seems to me the STEPS project is vaporware there is no code. It would be interesting to see basic code for how to handle small custom GUI changes in widgets that have been the same for 40 years e.g. calendar picker and file chooser.

> In this modern age of .md and similar files why not try for "blue water sailing" and instead create an office suite which specifically plays to only open standards?

Because your publisher, professor, employer, collaborators, and book club members all want an Office file. Full stop. They will not accept anything else, and they will refuse to work with you unless you have the clout to force them to use your new format. And then they will be unhappy.

That’s what this article is getting at. If you want to replace Office, you need to have full compatibility with Office files. There’s no way around it. Most people don’t want more open, faster, more features, or better. They want Office (or increasingly, Google Docs).

Don't tell me a publisher is using the layout and font settings of my word document to have it printed. I can go as far that tracked changes, grammar and spelling are done while the doc is being written but once it gets serious into printing I still this a proper publishing software is used to fine tune kerning and all the other font stuff. So in saying that perfect layout by LO in MS formats is not the issue.

Send your publisher a .docx file made by converting a .md using Pandoc:

https://pandoc.org/

I used to work in publishing --- Word docs were hacked at (as noted elsethread often with track changes enabled) by editors since it was their standard tool, then they would get flowed into PageMaker, or Quark XPress, or Ventura Publisher, or Adobe InDesign --- except of course for the LaTeX docs.

For .docx, the converted file is fine, so long as it has all the text and bold/italics which the author wants.

> A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.

This kind of thinking in tech is why Office doesn't have any serious competitors. It's insufficient for what most business users need, and they're the reason the whole world runs on Office.

It's kind of crazy how half-assed and terrible the web app competitors to Office are.

It's been 30 years, and Office 95 was objectively better and more full featured than Google Docs in 2024. Even Microsoft Works would blow Google Docs out of the water in a feature-by-feature comparison.

To be fair, office 95 was an incredible release and it had a similar increase in sophistication that windows 95 did over earlier versions of windows. The Microsoft works of that era, which I think was version 4, was also a big step up. I assume that is because it must share some software components with the full office suite. the later versions of office have not really added much useful functionality. The ribbon was perhaps the big change since that era, but it was largely unnecessary.

Business users don't want .md files

But they should use it, stop wasting time formatting a word doc to have the letter address placed correctly or the custom property fields linked to in line text.

Cool now how do I get a table in my markdown file? And a chart? Also some diagrams.

Does MD format do footnotes, along with page headers and footers? Floating images?

I agree office documents aren't the ideal format for business users' workflows. However, I disagree markdown is the solution.

Which is why one can use Pandoc to convert a .md to a .docx

Good luck convincing a business user to even let you finish the first sentence explaining Pandoc and Markdown to them.

They don't even know what .docx is necessarily. It's just "the report" or "a Word".

They don't even know where it's saved. And it's only getting worse: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

.md is a terrible format for serious work. It only supports a few opinionated types of formatting. This is reasonable when you want to directly write one (the intended use of the format). For interchange you want at least RTF or XHTML.

Because eventually you'll want to insert an image with text wrapped around it, or really anything more complicated than straight-down text and tables, and "just write HTML and CSS bro" is insanely unrealistic.

Sure, WYSWIYG editors for Markdown could exist, but building these editors gets crazy complicated fast, and why would you when Office exists?

There's RStudio with its WYSIWYG "visual"[1] editor for markdown(ahem, rMarkdown or quarto, which are pandoc's markdown + extensions). It is quite feature-rich albeit I am unsure whether it supports wrapping images. I bet you can write a little inline CSS in a fenced div[2][3] for it, but it is likely not an option for casual user. What it does support is rendering all the goodies in plethora of output formats[4]: docx pdf, html for plain documents; revealjs(html), pptx, beamer(pdf) for presentations. You can even generate websites with it As for spreadsheets, RStudio supports both R and python which are incredibly powerful for manipulating and visualizing table-like data

I won't argue that those are easy tools to learn, but if you do, you have much more power than with MS/{word,excel,powerpoint}

[1]: https://rstudio.github.io/visual-markdown-editing/

[2]: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-fenced_divs

[3]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76421783/text-and-image-...

[4]: https://quarto.org/docs/guide/

For that sort of thing, folks should import their Word (or other format) document into a tool such as Microsoft Publisher, or Scribus, or InDesign, or LaTeX.

Different apps render Markdown differently. The syntax may be standardized (though extended in different ways), but the layout will be wildly different if you open the same document in several different apps. This doesn’t resolve the author’s stated issue of not having a true wysiwyg document when shared with a third party.

But not one of the things you mention is an “open standard”.