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Comment by m16ghost | Hacker News Reader

>They were numbering paragraphs, not line items, and lines that wrapped were supposed to be left-justified. I don't think this is a strawman.

Word allows you to adjust the indentation on numbered lists so that the text in a paragraph is flush with the left margin. In Word 365 there are at least two ways to do this:

1. View -> Show -> [check Ruler] -> [Adjust the indentation on the ruler]

2. Layout -> Paragraph -> [click lower right arrow] Paragraph Settings -> Indentation -> change Special from (hanging) to (none), or change the "By:" value to 0

So the author's motivating example doesn't seem to be a particularly fair criticism of Word.

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It's not a critisism on the possibility of doing this in Word. It's the critisism that at least three people (the document creator and two interns) did not use it, either due to ignorance or because Word has frequent problems with automatic lists. Either way, this is a problem with Word.

For me, Word and LaTeX are on par. Styles, referencing, formula, macros, auto-layout are possible in both. However real-world use is different because Word is the lowest common denominator and thus mostly only the basic features actually get used. Because everybody experienced the horror of automatic features at least once.

Automatic numbering in Word is a nightmare. A separate list created pages before will continue its numbering onto a new list several pages behind. I always type lists as #1,#2,#3 as a crosshatch+digit does not call automatic numbering. Even if you turn it off, a collaborator might turn it back on, resulting in chaos.

In using Word with long documents, I'm reminded of pilots' early criticism of Airbus software, "What's it doing now?"

You'll be glad to learn that Word has included a "Restart List" option for 13 years or more (was relabeled to "Restart Numbering" at some point)

I swear this whole thread could be best described as:

"Geeks that have read 2000 man pages about LaTex and have never bothered to browse Word docs complain about missing feature in Word that is actually in Word since the last millenium" :-))

But only about 10% of Word users are aware of this feature (granted, the other 90% wouldn’t enjoy LaTeX either). And if you see another document where this is done, you still don’t know how to do that yourself.

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