[kqr]

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time.

When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.)

With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for something to be designed well in print, it makes most sense to use a desktop publishing tool like Scribus. For the web, something like Org or Markdown covers 99% of the use cases. Org or manually writing LaTeX is good for print use when fancy designs are not key.

What do you people use word processors for?

[kijin]

Office suites, as the name suggests, are for office workers. You know, the kind of people who write stern letters on official letterhead, work on Excel workbooks, and give PowerPoint presentations in front of other people.

It's probably not the kind of job that a typical programmer would like to have, but there are hundreds of millions of these jobs in governments, schools, and corporate offices all over the world. I bet they make up a much larger market than all the programmers in the world combined. We need to get out of the programmer bubble in order to see why a seemingly obsolete piece of software like LibreOffice is still such a big deal. Just one country deciding on it as the official standard means millions of people will be using FOSS in a critical part of their workflow.

I did my M.A. and Ph.D. in the humanities and wrote both dissertations using Microsoft Word. My professors would have been very confused if I had sent them anything other than .doc(x) for review.

[txcwpalpha]

>My professors would have been very confused if I had sent them anything other than .doc(x) for review.

This, in particular, is the most important point. The parent commenter says "I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process". Well, in the vast majority of cases, .docx is the final production medium. Most people use MS Word as both a document editor and a document reader.

I've worked at many companies and very rarely is any of the work product "finalized" into something like a PDF or a magazine. 90%+ of our work is meant to be continuously iterated on and added to over time, meaning it needs to stay in .docx. This applies even in the tech world, where things like design documents, project plans, etc are all used as well.

[kijin]

Moreover, I think the trend you described will only become more popular as the world moves away from printed media.

When STEM people think of a "final production medium", they usually think of articles in journals. But who reads paper journals anymore? Most people who are active in their fields don't even read PDFs of paper journals; they've already seen the preprints on arxiv. We're all just exchanging tarballs of source code, and nobody is compiling anything.

The thing I like the best about Microsoft Word is the review feature. Multiple people can edit, annotate, and comment on specific parts of the same document. You can inspect each diff and either accept or reject it. Everything is color-coded and can be manipulated using a mouse. It's like commenting on a github commit, but much more intuitive for people whose job is to exchange human-readable documents, not source code.

[kqr]

> The thing I like the best about Microsoft Word is the review feature. Multiple people can edit, annotate, and comment on specific parts of the same document. You can inspect each diff and either accept or reject it. Everything is color-coded and can be manipulated using a mouse. It's like commenting on a github commit, but much more intuitive for people whose job is to exchange human-readable documents, not source code.

This is an interesting perspective! I author in plain text, and when collaborating, I prefer using what's essentially the Phabricator code review workflow to elicit comments and improvements until the change is fixed.

Working with changes this way is useful in that it atomises and comparmentalises changes, so the history is easier to inspect after the fact. And so far, few people have found it unintuitive -- they don't even know it was designed for source code in the first place, they just like that it's clear what's expected of them at each step in the process.

I think sometimes it's easy to underestimate how good tools for programmers are, but it's easy to see why: in any field, if you want to find good tools, look at what the toolmaker has to use. I think a lot of people would prefer the programmer tools if given sufficient polish and the proper introduction.

[kijin]

Programmers' tools are great for dealing with plain text, so if you write plain text, good for you! But other people often deal with things that aren't plain text, and I don't think it's a good idea to try to squeeze them into the lowest common denominator just because it's more natural for us.

It's easy to underestimate how much meaning ordinary people bestow upon layouts, colors, and other stylistic choices that programmers often think is frivolous. I think we should focus more on how we might design tools that allow people to work together effectively on non-plain-text content (rich text, photos, videos, you name it) than how we might convince everyone to adopt our plain-text tools.

[welly]

I think you overestimate the technical ability of many users who are using tools such as Microsoft Office (or Libre Office), given many of them struggle even with those tools never mind anything more technical.

[kqr]

Those tools have interfaces that have remained virtually unchanged since the infancy of personal computing. I highly doubt they represent the pinnacle of user interaction.

[Aloha]

I live in a world where I have to interact with non-technical people, and I need to produce documents that are editable by those non-technical people.

Non-technical people can take a document produced by pages, MS Word, and OO Writer, and load them up, make changes and send them back. The cloud has not yet caught up with my part of the industry I work in.

I'd love to be able to work in Markdown (or even groff) and then feed that to something to produce nice looking documents - in the end I use word, because its the easiest way to get passed the post. PDF is my most favored document interchange format, provided that edibility is not a prime desire.

What I'd love is a word processor, that allows me to use PDF as the prime document format for saving, editing, etc.

[kqr]

> my most favored document interchange format, provided that edibility is not a prime desire.

Come on, Baader-Meinhof! I literally just seconds ago learned the term "faulty diction", and then you throw in my face an editability/edibility mixup.

[apetresc]

Well, PDFs don't taste very good, either.

[peatmoss]

I feel exactly the same way. Word processors are a muddle of a middle ground, where you are forced to manage styles and layouts with substandard comtrols, and get none of the dependable benefits of structured text.

I think word processors are just entrenched. People expect this degree of control, and don’t know how better things can be in either direction.

Fun fact: the original Google word processor wasn’t really much of a word processor. It was more akin to LyX, where users chose the type of text they were working with, and then IIRC, CSS styling was applied. But then the pressure to be a “real word processor” got the better of them, and it got rewrote as the thing it is today.

Frame Maker... now that was a nice take on document creation.

[vxNsr]

People use word processors to write documents that can be easily edited by multiple people while still being easily readable the whole time.

I'd be interested to know what product you use to compose your documents in.

[kqr]

In the absence of forced company policy, my experience of word processors have generally been one of rather poor compatibility. I assume company policies are what helps people interact through word processors?

I personally like Org to compose the copy of a document. It's a plain text format that makes sense to a lot of people, the reference implementation has most of the powerful features I'd miss from word processors, and it's reasonably easy to script missing advanced features.

[arminiusreturns]

I second emacs org mode. I've started to really buy into the everything is text nix philosophy. I use it for so much, my website skeletons are exported to html from org, my data science workbooks are org, my resume is org I export to latex, and so on.

I also use libreoffice, but mostly only when forced to deal with docs or PowerPoint etc. I think libreoffice does a lot of things right and am glad to have their wysiwyg when I don't feel like thinking.

Also, I think it's shameful so many professors require docx..

[zokier]

I've been thinking that we need a new generation of word processors aimed for authoring blog posts (and wiki pages etc). Sure you and I might be happy editing markdown with vi (although honestly I'm not happu with that), but that is not really solution for wider usage.

Most features of word processors are equally applicable for web-style content, but somehow we ended up having completely separate ecosystem there.

One major issue hampering creation of such tool is the relative lack of standardization on the web. Every content platform has its own format and api etc, so making common tooling is difficult.

See also Windows Live Writer

[voltagex_]

Windows Live Writer became Open Live Writer!

https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter

[kqr]

I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but have you tried Emacs Org mode? It is structural plain text at its core, but Emacs theming functionality lets you live preview the document to reasonable detail. It has matured enough to provide advanced functionality expected from word processors, and it has a powerful exporting and publishing framework capable of producing all sorts of document types including blog posts.

[jancsika]

The productivity increase from using a single WYSIWYG word processor instead of four different technologies (one of which is LaTex which won't give you any output for certain types of errors) is worth the marginal decrease in quality of output.

[zouhair]

Maybe you want to give Lyx[0] a try.

[0]: https://www.lyx.org/

[jawilson2]

I miss using lyx and latex so much. I used it for my dissertation, and used mercurial for version tracking (this was 2008-2009, when mercurial and git were still neck and neck). When I updated an analysis and got new results, it triggered a rebuild of the thesis with new plots and descriptions. I had more than a year of history showing how the results progressed. Word docs can't approach this.

[_emacsomancer_]

> What do you people use word processors for?

Dealing with people who use word processors.

(Word processors are hateful and waste large chunks of my time whenever I have to deal with them it seems.)

[geff82]

Excellent question. I have found that I need office suites less and less. The reason I still have an Office365 subscription is for Onedrive and Onenote, for the few remaining classic documents I use Libreoffice because I found that I almost never exchange pure .doc-files with anyone, so no focus on perfect compatibility is needed and I do not want to grow some dependency on Microsoft somehow (nothing against MS, I just like independence).

To answer your question: I only use Libreoffice to write write the occasional letter to state authorities and to write my invoices (which are few). For serious documents, I exclusively use LaTeX as I love not having to care about layout details (it sometimes takes time to figure new stuff out, like putting graphics into the perfect place, but when a deadline is near, the layouting is nothing I have to care about any more).

[kqr]

Letters! Good point! I'd probably still prefer having a letterhead template in Scribus and author in plain text, but I can totally see why most people would consider that overkill and instead use a word processor to combine the two tasks.

[stronglikedan]

I use word processors to specify complex systems. I can quickly navigate the document visually, without having to use Pandoc and its ilk to convert it to a format that's easy on the eyes. Other tools that live-preview markdown just aren't there yet. I also get a lot of automated functionality for complex structures like lists, tables, section numbering (in multiple formats) and tables-of-contents. I have really, really tried to be as efficient with Markdown and its ilk, but it doesn't even come close. I would also mention the interop benefit, but that would be beating a dead horse at this point.

[kqr]

I am also of the opinion that for anything remotely resembling complexity, Markdown is very lacking.

But the things you mention are the things I do with Org and Emacs Org mode. Is that something you have tried?

[ChristianBundy]

I use word processors to work with other people. I can't tell you how many times I've been sent .doc, .ppt, .xls, or other Microsoft file formats that have become ubiquitous in the modern workplace.

[jkabrg]

In my university days, I used a word processor (Libreoffice Writer) as a kind of clipboard: I would copy and paste tables and webpages into it, and use it for something, I don't recall what. It's a bit like a quick-and-dirty Dreamweaver and it interacts with copy-and-paste beautifully. Kudos to the Libreoffice people.

A lot of the alternatives, like LyX, are too opinionated to paste into from the browser.

[jplayer01]

This is the most ignorant programmer thing I've seen said on hackernews. Utter lack of understanding for how all office workers interact and share information through Office documents.

[earenndil]

I don't. I generally write plaintext or html in a texteditor.

[megaman22]

Generally, I write everything in plain-text, and then as a final processing step, bring it into Word and format it. I hit on this process when I was in college, since SVN, which I was using for version control at the time, is such shit with doc files. It doesn't help that it is absolutely miserable to try to add footnotes to a paper as you are writing it in Word, and at the time, and perhaps still, futzing with them was a good way to make Word crash and lose a few unsaved paragraphs.