[viraptor]

> If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered.

These are not WYSIWYG solutions which answers 99% of your question "why". When people want to write a document they want to write things and have the things appear on a page, possibly in different formatting. Injecting ideas like source files, rendering pipeline, etc. will just result in confused people.

That's why online solutions like Google docs are popular. No special app, things look like expected, you can collaborate, and few people actually need any fancy features.

[PaulHoule]

TeX is a 1970s system. I thought it was cool in the 1990s, but in 2020 it makes the typesetter in me want to hurl.

[andi999]

Whats wrong with the tex typesetting?

[quietbritishjim]

The worst part is the default font, Computer Modern, which is absolutely deplorable. I'm not a big fan of the general style of "modern" fonts (a name coined at the end of the 19th centry when they still were actually modern). But, worse than that, Computer Modern is horrifically slim and spindly. I've read repeated rumours over the years that it was deliberately this way because the printers of the time used ink that would run a bit so the font was like that to compensate, but I don't know if it's true.

That's not such a big deal since you can obviously change the font. For a long time there were lots of text fonts but very few math fonts, and those math fonts that did exist would either have some symbols from Computer Modern or wouldn't have a suitably similar text font. But now there are a fair number of choices. Personally I like mathpazo (with Palatino for text) but I've found people used to Computer Modern can find this a bit much of a radical departure. (Edit: I've found a more conservative choice is Times for text and Utopia (MathDesign) for math.)

TeX does have a few small typesetting niggles. For example, if you set f(x)g(y) with normal small brackets around the x but large brackets around the y (because it's really a displayed fraction) then you'll find g is miles away from its argument but right next to f's argument. (I'll avoid opening the can of worms about what the root cause is here, but it's very clearly wrong in this case.) This is actually not that big a deal either - there are lots of problems like this but they're all fairly minor and small in number compared to the huge number of things typeset correctly. The only problem comes when people refuse to correct things because they assume that if TeX typesets it that way then that must be correct by definition.

[rleigh]

Have you tried XeTeX with the TeX Gyre fonts? It made a big difference for me. (I previously used pslatex and then pdflatex with Palatino/mathpazo as well.)

[PaulHoule]

I can't stand the fonts, don't like how it applies space, etc.

TeX is like a programmable pocket calculator from the 1970s, way ahead of it's time but today it's something that conspires with Word, Google Docs, and other dull tools to suck out the oxygen for sharp tools.

[andi999]

So which programm does it better?

[MarcScott]

I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die. For the vast majority of people they want nothing more than:

> text

> image

> more text

> table

> more text

There are any number of applications that allow you to write markdown and view the generated HTML in whatever formatting you want. Your recipient then gets to choose their own fonts, colours etc, which from an accessibility point of view, is much better.

Unless you're printing a hardcopy or creating a PDF, what is the point of Word?

[viraptor]

I don't believe you'd be able to convince anyone not in tech that writing "" is in any way better than clicking "insert image" if you just want to send someone a report. Never mind explaining that paths need to be relative and resources included in the attachments.

Even I, happily maintaining some pages in reST, wouldn't want to inflict that on people.

[WoodenChair]

> I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die.

WYSIWYG is a big part of what made the GUI revolution so successful. The computer for the rest of us, wouldn't be for the rest of us, if we had to worry about Git and how to render our file format.

I've had the same frustrations dealing with publishers and Word templates as you had. Your mistake is that you are conflating our experience writing a technical book with the vast majority of users who are not writing technical literature. A writing system for the masses should be as easy to use (for the basics at least) as paper and pencil. Git and learning even a simple markup language does not meet this standard.

[beagle3]

WYSIWYG for professional word processing is like training wheels - it lets you start being productive on day one, but if you don't spend the effort to learn how to work without them, they get in the way and make you slower -- although you wouldn't know that unless you've seen someone who can do the job without them.

I have not used Word for ~10 years, but not in the last ~20 or so years, after I realized how much time and effort it cost me -- nearly missed an important deadline because of a Word 2 vs Word 6 incompatibility that manifested in a very inopportune moment.

It's been around for almost 30 years. I'm constantly receiving documents from people who've used it for >25years. And there is never use of styles, often spaces instead of tabs, many "new lines" instead of a page break, and a host of other things like that. References are not dynamic (just typed out) meaning that an item inserted in the middle of a list makes many of them wrong.

The vast majority of people who have used it for decades use it mostly as a smart typewriter, because the "pro" features like styles require a lot of discipline and the "let's just press the bold button" is too easy and enticing.

WYSIWYG needs to die whenever anything professional is needed.

[xnyan]

You're speaking absolute crazy talk man.

>Write markdown

You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.

[PaulHoule]

What gets me is that there's something basically wrong with the "Microsoft Word" text editing model.

Basically, when you try to set the properties of text (e.g. bold, fonts, ...) there are always anomalous behaviors involving:

* if you just start typing what font it is in

* selections (why is that the selection region seems to actively avoid the exact selection you want?)

There is something fundamentally wrong with the data model behind it that makes it impossible to implement in a way that makes sense 100%.

[quietbritishjim]

I think you can turn off that smart selection thing. There is corresponding "smart" behaviour when you drag a selection to a different place so you don't end up with missing or duplicated spaces, so the precise boundary of the selection isn't as important as you think unless you want to select mid-word. I think for most people this behaviour that you find annoying is actually useful - remember that Microsoft is one of the few companies that actually does real user testing.

For your other objection (and maybe what you were also really getting at with your selection objection), maybe you'd like WordPerfect 5.1's "reveal codes"? :-) We can all agree that Microsoft wouldn't have hesitated to steal that feature if it would have benefitted them. The fact that they didn't is proof that formatting markup is something that was historically tried (or considered) and rejected, rather than something waiting to happen in the future.

In any case, for a program as huge as Microsoft Word, I think this is all quite minor. How much of your day is really ruined if you start typing after some bold text, find that the new text is bold when you didn't want it to be, and have to manually turn it off again? It's a fundamental problem with the model, like you said, but has surprisingly tiny impact on usability. If this is your biggest objection, it's almost proof that the program is pretty good. (But I can sympathise with minor objections: I hate copy and paste works differently in Excel then any other program!)

[Jasper_]

I wouldn't consider myself an advanced Word user and all of my documents have needed more functionality than that.