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Comment by dev_l1x_be | Hacker News Reader

There are so many better alternatives but it seems many people really like Word for some weird reason. The last time I cared I had to look up how to make a document starting the page numbering on the 2nd page. It turns out there are totally different ways between different versions of Word. shrug.jpg

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What are the "so many better alternatives"? Google Docs is pretty decent but a fair bit more basic. Proper technical authoring systems like Typst, LyX and LaTeX are way too hard for the average person. LibreOffice is much worse than MS Word.

I mean workflows. Gdocs is disastrous in many scenarios. I think document management should be more like software version management with a nice ui. Editing the content (what it has) vs editing the template (how it looks). Markdown + a typst template gets you far. I have exactly that for my docs and it works very well. Not sure yet about how a decent size company could adopt anything like that.

Such as? Word hits the sweet spot of having support for all the complexity the average person may encounter/want to create.

Libre, Apple Pages, and Google Docs all seem like clearly worse tools in most aspects in my experience.

LaTeX is extremely powerful, but also way too complicated for the average non-HN person/person who doesn't live in complicated documents.

I almost agree. Have you tried to add an image in LaTeX that does not wander to a random page?

  \begin{figure}[HERE!!!!!!]

or something like that.

And in the old compiler, I remember a problem with bounding boxes, and keeping a eps and pdf version of each image to get a correct dvi and pdf. I think this part is fixed now.

id say markdown for LLMs

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