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Comment by GrumpySloth | Hacker News Reader

> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly".

Or maybe those people just have eyes which can spot the differences in spacing between documents created with different Word versions, the mediocre kerning, and a multitude of other typographical annoyances.

Even a website is easier to replicate exactly in another browser than a Word document to be replicated from scratch in a new version of Word. And if by some miracle you manage that, the end result will always look meh.

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> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly".

I used to teach how to write serial letters with Word to secretaries when I was in high school. I used to write VBA macros that call in and out SAP systems when I was a junior software engineer - because "I was young and I needed the money."™

Now I either write in Emacs or Sublime on a Linux box with 2 TB RAM, or in Overleaf (LaTeX collab Web application), and I say: "Word sucks", I shall be suffering no more.

Word does not exist in my operating system (except for QEMU), and nobody notices.

LaTeX creates beautifully typeset publications, and most day to day writing requires nothing more than plain text, which is the most durable format.

Yes, anyone who's ever learned LaTeX and why it was invented immediately sees how absolutely awful Word is at its rendering. Funny that a trillion-dollar company can't seem to figure out a better algorithm than Donald Knuth mocked up in Pascal decades ago.

I think of this as another version of enshittification -- the acceptance of poor performance as the "standard".

And don't get me started on math equations in Word ...

Seriously, Word (and other word processing software) and TeX come from two separate lines of evolution. Knuth is a computer science guru, and invented TeX to effectively and precisely output technical and scientific documents. Word and other word processors (before and after) came from the creative and business worlds. The two didn't have any influence on each other for many years -- you can write a novel in LaTeX, and you can write a scientific paper in Word, but those aren't what the program was written for, and it shows in the awful editing and rendering of equations in Word. (I can't make a similar assertion for LaTeX...being based on plain, rather than formatted, text, it's easier to separate content in a LaTeX document from the end format, while in Word the content and formatting are inextricably bound together.)

To be fair, if you use Word properly you can separate content and formatting. The key is to use styles. The problem is nobody learns this and by default the bold and colour buttons etc are right there and oh so tempting. Everyone thinks they can use Word because you just type and do a few obvious things like change font size etc. It's just not considered something that needs to be learnt.

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