I consider myself a Word power user. I’ve spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I’ve designed professional corporate template suites in it.
I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again.
It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can’t delete if you don’t need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are “font themes” which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them.
I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren’t much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamental level.
Oddly, Google Docs is the least junky one, probably because JS had a bunch of limitations at the time it was started, and Google had to limit the features.
I’ve been pretty happy with Pandoc, some LaTeX, and scripts. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.
I actually like the ribbon UI compared to what came before. Jensen Harris from the office design team way back in 2008 gave this talk about how they invented the ribbon:
Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.
I haven’t seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, LATEX for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.
I know that workflow style is good for like dissertations and academic journal articles, but the sort of templates I have to design and work in are more splashy and dramatic. The look and structure is more akin to what you see in artsy magazines and books—pages with dark background colors, decorative stock images, vector shapes, etc. Can Latex be used for that?
Ah, it’s not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it’s doable.
I would not use latex for any document that should be a template for other people to fill in. Unless you’re a peer reviewed journal.
I wouldn’t use latex for anything that requires precise positioning of images and elements. InDesign and similar are a much better option.
I do like to use markdown for any document that does not fall into those categories.
I like to use latex for any document I’m writing which I want someone else to style.
Latex is very cool for styling, but in my experience most of the time you do not really need that amount of configurability and the added time to correctly make a styled document in latex is way more than what it would take you in word, even when you have to fight word to make it. That is unless you need equations, but then again: just write markdown with latex equations.
You cannot control where pictures occur within a text body in latex, it decides for you. You can give it recommendations, but it’ll figure out the final alignment when rendering to page. I’m not sure that’s a limitation you want for design-focused use cases.
And if you want to do something seriously nice you need to code a it in latex’s reverse Polish notation code language from hell, let me tell you latex ain’t the future of ease haha
When I have to work on docx I generally can do it with LibreOffice and I’m quite happy with that.
Sometimes I can not, I had for example this pesky thing which wouldn’t let me edit parts of the document as it was locked, especially on tables. No amount of conversations across file formats fixes that for some reason.
That is when I have to open up the office365 webpage. What a fucking piece of garbage. Most things you mention do not even exist in there. You can write a document and add comments, managing styles is already a bit too much for the yearly fee they charge you.
I hope they make it possible again to install the office suite on Linux.
And in no way I’m saying I like LibreOffice better than word, they’re both quite terrible; but at least one of them runs on my system.
God the style presets in OnlyOffice are driving me insane. Sometimes they apply, and change the style accordingly, sometimes not. Sometimes they need a double click to apply all of the styling. They reset with any page formatting change. The list is comically absurdly long, and yeah, some aren’t deletable. What the fuck are T1 through T94? Why can’t I just create a few custom header and footer styles for my document? It’s just a piece of fiction. It doesn’t need 307 different header styles, and every possible variation of footnote, goddamn.
I consider myself a Word power user. I’ve spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I’ve designed professional corporate template suites in it.
I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again.
It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can’t delete if you don’t need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are “font themes” which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them.
I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren’t much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamental level.
Yeah, word processors are garbage.
Oddly, Google Docs is the least junky one, probably because JS had a bunch of limitations at the time it was started, and Google had to limit the features.
I’ve been pretty happy with Pandoc, some LaTeX, and scripts. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.
You didn’t even mention the ribbon lol.
I actually like the ribbon UI compared to what came before. Jensen Harris from the office design team way back in 2008 gave this talk about how they invented the ribbon:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4
Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.
I haven’t seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, LATEX for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.
On my end, it looks like you tried to layout your comment with Latex and failed. :D
I know that workflow style is good for like dissertations and academic journal articles, but the sort of templates I have to design and work in are more splashy and dramatic. The look and structure is more akin to what you see in artsy magazines and books—pages with dark background colors, decorative stock images, vector shapes, etc. Can Latex be used for that?
For snazzy layouts for publishing and stuff, you might want to give Scribus a try! It’s like an alternative to Microsoft’s “Publisher.”
https://www.scribus.net/
Ah, it’s not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it’s doable.
I would not use latex for any document that should be a template for other people to fill in. Unless you’re a peer reviewed journal.
I wouldn’t use latex for anything that requires precise positioning of images and elements. InDesign and similar are a much better option.
I do like to use markdown for any document that does not fall into those categories. I like to use latex for any document I’m writing which I want someone else to style.
Latex is very cool for styling, but in my experience most of the time you do not really need that amount of configurability and the added time to correctly make a styled document in latex is way more than what it would take you in word, even when you have to fight word to make it. That is unless you need equations, but then again: just write markdown with latex equations.
You cannot control where pictures occur within a text body in latex, it decides for you. You can give it recommendations, but it’ll figure out the final alignment when rendering to page. I’m not sure that’s a limitation you want for design-focused use cases.
And if you want to do something seriously nice you need to code a it in latex’s reverse Polish notation code language from hell, let me tell you latex ain’t the future of ease haha
deleted by creator
When I have to work on docx I generally can do it with LibreOffice and I’m quite happy with that. Sometimes I can not, I had for example this pesky thing which wouldn’t let me edit parts of the document as it was locked, especially on tables. No amount of conversations across file formats fixes that for some reason.
That is when I have to open up the office365 webpage. What a fucking piece of garbage. Most things you mention do not even exist in there. You can write a document and add comments, managing styles is already a bit too much for the yearly fee they charge you.
I hope they make it possible again to install the office suite on Linux.
And in no way I’m saying I like LibreOffice better than word, they’re both quite terrible; but at least one of them runs on my system.
God the style presets in OnlyOffice are driving me insane. Sometimes they apply, and change the style accordingly, sometimes not. Sometimes they need a double click to apply all of the styling. They reset with any page formatting change. The list is comically absurdly long, and yeah, some aren’t deletable. What the fuck are T1 through T94? Why can’t I just create a few custom header and footer styles for my document? It’s just a piece of fiction. It doesn’t need 307 different header styles, and every possible variation of footnote, goddamn.
Basically a lightweight markup (instead of xml) in a container to carry media and styles with it?