[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.