All Word Processors Suck | Hacker News Reader

All Word Processors Suck

shamusyoung.com

5 pointshitonagashi4 comments

Everyone wants an application that does everything they want, but only what they want. The result is that application developers have to create software that includes features representing a cross-section of their users' requirements. This is not an easy problem to solve.

I find more recent versions of Microsoft Word far easier to use. The Ribbon has tucked away infrequently used features to UI spaces that are easy to reach, but not "in your face". My first stop is the "auto-correct" preferences. Once you've turned all that crap off, the software is perfectly usable for me.

Perhaps the author should consider some of the popular applications that are targeted specifically at authors: Scrivener, WriteRoom, Ulysses, etc.

However, anyone expecting powerful software to work exactly as you expect is setting themselves up for disappointment. I can't think of a flexible, powerful tool that doesn't involve a learning curve of some sort.

I don't think that the learning curve could really be said to be the problem when you're talking about a word processor that deliberately deletes three days worth of saves when it crashes.

That's not even the argument I'm trying to make. The crashing issue is just bad software. There's no argument against that. It's implicit in the points that I make that I'm referring to his frustration with bloat and his perception that some rather advanced features should be "easy" (chapter markers, for example). In order for a machine to parse text, it must be given some specific information. It cannot read the language and understand where a chapter begins or ends based on some arbitrary value that we have in our minds. We must use the machine's language, because the machines are not able to understand what we mean. Hell, many humans frequently fail at understanding what is being communicated to them.

This article just started an echo chamber in my head, "Just use LaTeX". Seriously.

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