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Goodbye Cruel Word
theodp writes "The problem with Microsoft Word, writes the NYT's Virginia Heffernan, is that 'I always feel as if I'm taking an essay test.' Seeking to break free of the tyranny of Microsoft Word, Heffernan takes a look at Scrivener and the oh-so-retro WriteRoom, which she and others feel jibe better with the way writers think. 'The new writing programs encourage a writerly restart. You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet, adjust your preference for long or short sentences, opt afresh for action over description. Renewal becomes heady: in WriteRoom's gloom is man's power to create something from nothing, to wrest form from formlessness. Let's just say it: It's biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?'"
"The problem with Word and notably Microsoft, is that they have attempted to make both Windows and their apps, notably Office, all things to all people with an interface that has not really changed at all over the course of its lifetime."
Office 2007 is leaps and bounds over anything Microsoft put out before. The interface is also heavily improved, so I don't know where you're getting this (unless this is pre-2005 when Office 2007 wasn't public knowledge)
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http://texmacs.org/ FREE!
from the looks of the front page you would think math geeks would only use it but it also functions as an excellent word processor...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
A guy with a brand new Fender Strat doesn't sound like Jimi Hendrix. Nor can you drive better in a Lotus than an xB.
What's more likely is that if you think you're doing better and that helps you, so much the better.
Document composers for mass mailings, labels, newsletters, all need different features that aren't part of the word processing function of creativity, rather its creative exposition. I'll write (a dozen books, thousands of articles so far) on whatever, and won't go to Jerry Pournelle's years of bitching about the nuances. It's the content, Jerry. It's the content. Word, Word Perfect, WordStar, Zedit, Joe, Vi, textedit, don't much matter. Grammar checkers, spell checkers, syntactical analyzers, pretty printers, code-indenting hoohaa, I don't care. Let me write. Grace and elegance are for those that need glitter and swan-like moves. They look pretty, but it's only style, and style will always be subjective. Content rules; fancy-assed WYSIWYG twelve-key-combo-crap drools.
Just my 2c worth.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.
This was a coffee-out-the-nose moment for me - it's a parody of the very first paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
"Here's the basic problem: you're writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It's 2007."
Read my blog.
I've used Word since version 1.0 when it came on two 5-1/4" floppies and included a mouse in the box and ran on the original IBM 8088. Before that I used Word Factory, Wordstar and Zardax. I've used every version of Word since 1.0. It is now certainly bloated and busy. It's advanced features such as multiple indexing can drive you crazy with their ineptness, but at heart it is simply a blank screen for you to fill in. Turn off the Nazi grammar feature and it pretty well leaves you alone to do what you want. If you aren't creative, Word won't make you so. If you are creative, Word isn't going to regiment you into not being so. To claim otherwise is an excuse. Maybe you just aren't, like, creative at all. Blaming the software won't turn it around any more than the paper you use. If 8-1/2 x 11" paper is too authoritarian for you, try Charmin to better express your creativity. By all means use another word processor if it makes you feel better, but I don't think a few people looking for another cause are going to lead an exodus away from Word any time soon.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
There's something to be said for a writing tool for writers.
First, professional writers need only minimal formatting capability. Formatting is someone else's job. Any formatting done by the author will just interfere with page makeup later. Writers need to be able to insert chapter breaks, and that's about it.
Second, the word processor should not interrupt the flow of writing. Auto-completion is usually not wanted. Spell checking is probably better done after the fact, not during writing.
Third, not losing the text is important. The writer should not have to "save". A word processor which guaranteed it would never lose the text, backed up by continuous remote backup to multiple sites and an insurance policy, would probably have a following among pros.
There are newsroom systems like this, on which reporters compose stories.
I read TFA, and these guys seem to be worried about the wrong thing. Word menus, etc, are easy enough to deal with. What makes it a god-forsaken piece of shit are all the bugs. Documents are always getting corrupted, figures don't do where you want and stay there, can't save sometimes for no apparent reason, the entire thing just bombs out, etc. We had a "Platinum Support Ticket" or some similar nonsense open on Word for a few years. The upshot, direct from a Microsoft senior support line, was that if we wanted documents to not get corrupted, was to print it out on paper, make sure it was right, then use a scanner and save it as a TIFF. Thanks, that's good advice.
What is so pathetic is that I have ordinary technical documents from the late 50's and 60's that are laid out better, have better graphics, and are still perfectly readable today. While at the same time, a Word document I saved last week either can't be opened, or has all the symbols corrupted.
Brett
I mean, what's the deal with them not using freely-available cross-platform tools to make it easy to build on your platform of choice if you don't use it on one of those?
What's more, just about none of the more popular Linux distributions have packages available for free download and install using your system's package manager.
I've used various versions of Word (and before that, the original AppleWorks on an Apple ][e) to write books and book-length dissertations. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I still think the best version of Word for the Mac is 5.1a.
For the last decade or so my strategy was to use Word's outliner then fill in the text. Pretty straightforward when you know exactly how things are supposed to go, like for a paper or a report. Unfortunately, I found them wanting for my creative writing, where I tend to write from the inside out, starting with a scene or a character or a funny sentence but not knowing where that bit would fit in a story. Sure, I could just dump everything in the ol' slop file, or link a bunch of individual files using Word's master document, but it was always forced and clunky.
Last October I was looking for a new tool for Nanowrimo and I experimented with WriteRoom, Jer's Novel Write, Lyx, CopyWrite, Storyist, and Scriviner. In the end it came down to Storyist and Scriviner. I liked how Storyist had novel templates, but they seemed overly restrictive--and the software cost twice as much. I ended up buying Scriviner.
What I like about Scriviner is that it gracefully handles working with both long chapters and little scraps, easily allowing you to change the views to an outline or index cards on a cork board with synopses, or as individual documents, or all run in together in a single window.
LaTeX tries to do a different thing than "desktop publishing," and for what it does, it does it extremely well, and is far better than any alternatives.
Back in the day, we had "word processors," and we had "desktop publishing software," the difference being that the desktop publishing software let you precisely control page layout and were WYSIWYG. Word processors were things you typed documents into and they broke that document into pages to send to a printer. Word processors had extensive features to help you enter your document correctly, like spell and grammar checkers, ways to emphasize text by making it bold or underlined, and not much else. They processed words, not pages.
Then someone had the not-so-bright idea to bring WYSIWYG into word processing, combining Desktop Publishing Software and Word Processing Software into shitty abominations called WordPerfect > 5.1 and Microsoft Word. Putting a small subset of desktop publishing power into cheap, buggy software ensured that secretaries everywhere would abuse Comic Sans and clip art until the end of time, and attach their creations to what should have been plain text email.
My first "office suite" let you type your document into the word processor, then you could set up the page layout in the desktop publishing program and link the text in, where it would flow into the predetermined layout and fill it. Two discrete steps, which couldn't have been easier. Trying to do this all at once is a pain in the ass, especially if you're changing the document around (editing). The problems worsen when multiple people work on the same document.
Initially, it was obvious that word processing and desktop publishing were two very different things, and never the twain shall meet. We'd all be a lot better off if this distinction had stayed, because the problem with word processors today is not that they're trying to be all things to all people, but that they're trying to do two different things at the same time.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
It also depends on the balance between the textual content of what you write (the words) and the form they take. In past ages, writers simply wrote -- the formatting was the job of the publisher, and the author had no control over it (unless they were a Big Name). Now that it is possible for every writer to be their own typesetter, many of them feel that it is therefore their job to spend as much if not more time formatting what they write, than actually writing it.
The first thing your publisher does when they receive your final draft is probably to rip out every scrap of your formatting and put in their own, to conform to their house style. They would actually much rather have your book in plain text, with virtually zero formatting, than have to go through the expensive and time-consuming task of removing all the unnecessary hard spaces, hard linebreaks, hard pagebreaks, etc that authors insert in the fond belief that they are "helping". Smart publishers and skilled authors in technical fields use LaTeX or XML because the writer or editor can indicate what is what without prejudicing the formatting; but there are no interfaces to either system yet that are usable by the average non-specialist writer (see my paper on this topic to the Extreme Markup conference in 2006) although a couple are beginning to get close.
Unless you are writing for self-publication (just about viable now; in which case get professional typographic advice), your best bet is a wordprocessor with a stylesheet that uses some kind of Named Styles and that saves in XML so that the publisher can pick out your text with minimal formatting, and trash all the rest of the junk that wordprocessors typically insert. For a novel, however, which typically has only minimal formatting requirements anyway, it's probably not important what you use.
In fact there are a dozen or so simple interface changes that editor makers could implement that would radically ease the burden on the writer of formal or complex documents, but this would involve a paradigm shift in the interface away from concentrating on the appearance to concentrating on actually writing. Editor makers are reluctant to do this because it would reveal just how much of their interface is actually eye-candy and how little of it is really there to help the writer; and authors are naturally reluctant to forsake the comfort of their favourite wordprocessor, especially if they perceive a new interface as restricting their ability to decorate their text (not actually the case, but a perception nevertheless).
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Claimer: the usability of interfaces to editing structured documents is my thesis topic.I have to agree that, for me, the best writing environment is a terminal with vim (often using Compiz' ADD Helper to dim the desktop and all other windows)
... both an upside (freedom) and a downside (something you have to figure out and that might distract you).
... who knows?
...
... don't we use vim because it's what we use all day, anyway? As sysadmins / programmers / etc, it makes sense for us to use the editor that we always use (which is available on all OSes, as well).
Also, a lightweight markup language, like Markdown, lets you write normally - but be able to convert your document to XHTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc etc.
The biggest downside to using vim is that, unlike Scrivener, it doesn't give you explicit places to put your notes / outline / etc. So, using vim, you're free to put your notes / etc wherever you want
For drafting, I often using an SCM like git or subversion, but for little snippets and free-writes, etc? They might be written down on paper, they might be in a random note file
It might be worth it to use screen or vim split screens to reproduce something like Scrivener provides, with designated places on the sides to have notes, etc etc. I think I might try that out
But, come-on, really
I use vim for my writing, because it's what I use all day anyway.
I use git for keeping track of my files / drafts / revisions, because it's what I use all day anyway.
I use markdown for my markup, because it's what I use all day anyway.
You are not the first to say that WriteRoom == Bad copy of VIM, probably the best example of this idea can be found here. And frankly I can see where you are coming from, but I also think that you are not really understanding WriteRoom's purpose.
The key is that WriteRoom isn't meant to be a VIM, emacs, etc replacement. It looks a little bit the same, but if you play around with it you'll soon find that WriteRoom's features have very little overlap with a traditional unix text editor. WriteRoom isn't meant to be a flexible powerful tool for editing text.
Instead, it's just meant to provide distraction free writing. "For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world." That's the one feature. To allow this these are a few of the features that WriteRoom provides that are not easily possible in a tool like VIM. I say easily because "you" may be able to get VIM to do just about anything, but for a normal user who doesn't want to write custom scripts and edit config files it's just not possible to set the same environment up in VIM that I've provided in WriteRoom.
So that's what it does. If you already are a VIM expert these features may just not be worth it. But for many users they are, and for many other users the barrier to learning a command line tool is just to high. So the choice is really between something like WriteRoom and MS Word.
I would say the earlier Windows versions up to about 6 were the zenith of Word Processing. Novell was one thing but when Corel got it, ugh. Became buggy in their quest to dumb it down to "Wordishness".
I've never quite understood the bloatware bitching. If there are a lot of features you don't like, then shut up, sit down and don't use them for Chrissake. You can write your novel very happily in AbiWord I'm sure but don't complain because I want something that can do more. I used WP to do double-sided tri-folds. I don't know what I would have done without reveal codes for micromanaging stuff that as often as not was in text and graphics boxes rotated this way or that. Get a publishing package you say. Why? WordPerfect produced the B&W laserprinted trifolds we needed. Used macros to take a delimited server db addresses dump, convert it to a WP data file and do the merge and print. Routinely ran a whole bunch of lists that way for years with WP as the core program.
When Microsoft used their OS monopoly money to dump Office 97 on the market it was one of the most shameful examples of a monopoly murdering quality with artificial underpricing.
You're missing the point of using LaTeX. While it is true that LaTeX makes it very easy to add equations to a dissertation, the biggest problem with using Word is that you're constantly dealing with the formatting of your document rather than actually writing the content of your document. When you use LaTeX, you are pretty much giving the software complete control over layout and typesetting. You just tell LaTeX that you want an image / figure at a given location and the software decides the best location. The greatest thing about the LaTeX is how well cross-referencing works. You never have to worry about what index you assigned to a figure or an equation. You just reference it with a label and the LaTeX compiler automatically rebuilds your table of contents, list of figures and what not. Finally, most universities provide a LaTeX class file which you simply include in your LaTeX file. This will (usually) setup your dissertation with the necessary margins and formatting that is required by your faculty. If you use Word, then you will have endless headaches if you need to change your margins, because all of a sudden, your images are no longer attached to the paragraphs they belong to. If you insert an equation earlier on in your document, your reference numbers will get out of order. And if you're writing your dissertation in a sane way, then you will likely have separate files for each chapter (something totally unnecessary with LaTeX - just have separate .tex files for each chapter and include them in your main .tex file). So if you want to make formatting changes, you will have to apply those changes separately to each chapter, every single time a formatting change is required.
Anyway, before I wrote my MASc thesis, I had started doing it in Word because I had never used LaTeX and I was apprehensive about learning it. In retrospect, I am extremely happy that I ended up writing my thesis in LaTeX. Because .tex files are plain text, I committed the files to an SVN repository which allowed me access to my dissertation from any computer with an SVN client. And, once everything was setup in LaTeX, making changes to the document was easy. I never had to worry about formatting; I just focused on the content and didn't worry about how it looked. At the end of the day, it looked great and formatting required zero effort on my part because including the faculty class file was a simple process.
Thanks, but since when is something usable because MS says so? When I work in an application, I can tell whether or not its UI is discoverable, and whatever MS says does not change my live experience one way or another.
The Ribbon is awful for discoverability, because (a) the tooltips are tiny and hard to read (for some people, like myself), (b) sometimes the tooltips are posisioned over the button labels, so you see the key but no longer recognize the command it performs, and (c) because you have to press the darn Alt key! A menu is something you can open and while it stays open, you can navigate the menu and read the keyboard shortcuts at your own pace. As a readout, it is much clearer and more convenient.
Then there's the fact that you cannot customize the ribbon at all. The measly, tiny toolbar MS so graciously allows you to add buttons to is a sorry excuse.
Then the contextual shifting of the ribbon means I can no longer just click a button that I know is always there, almost without looking, since the mouse hand has its relative position memorized. Now I must check the current page first and switch to the one I need - a displacement of sorts. The shifting is visually distracting, too.
MS has repeatedly lied about how the Ribbon supposedly takes less vertical space than the menu and toolbars (not true), and likewise their usability claims are - at the very least - highly subjective.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
> (And do NOT say "WINE" or I will laugh because that software is largely a bad joke.
You've got it backwards. MS Windows is the bad joke; Wine is more like nicorette, it wanes your addiction to said bad joke.
Thanks for the credit -- I don't think any OS or toolset gets it right all of the time, and I try to call it on individual cases. There is MS stuff that I like (Visual Studio, for example) and MS stuff that I don't like (Office 2007, obviously).
The specific things I don't like about the Office 2007 UI are:
But they are all largely a matter of personal style. A heavy mouser won't mind the longer key sequences. Somebody desk based with a huge hi-res screen won't miss the real-estate. A right-brain dominant person will be glad to see the back of the menus. There are plenty of people for whom the interface will work just fine. What got me is that 2007 took away my choice. I had to work the way MS chose for me to work -- no, worse, I had to work in the way that a graphic designer in Redmond chose for me to work, and of course they have a visual rather than a verbal mind because that's what makes a good graphic designer. And I bet they have a huge screen. And I bet they prefer the mouse to the keyboard, because the mouse is better at graphics and layouts than the keyboard is. But I am not a graphic designer.
I've been told that there are third-party tools that can fix a lot of the problems I had. But the fact that it needs third-party tools to make the interface acceptable suggests to me that MS got it wrong in the first place. Not wrong in the sense that the interface is wrong for everybody, but wrong in that it assumes everybody works and thinks the same. One size does not fit all.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Hint: if you have to tell people how discoverable it is, it isn't.