Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nkhodyunya 4629 days ago
The author's argument that Microsoft Word in unavoidable because doc format is de facto standard in his problem domain seems bullshit to me. You can't substitute a document editor with document format like that. I mean, you can totally avoid using Microsoft Word for creating doc files by switching to latex/markdown/org/... with [pandoc][1] converter, for example, or use any kind of MSWord-like word processors, e.g. OpenOffice Writer(if this somehow change something). The author didn't mention any other problem with Word, except it's local ubiquity, which i don't find a problem at all. So, why hate so much?

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

1 comments

You're right, it's bullshit. Apart from anything else, Word saves in a ton of formats. I use Word all the time but I very rarely use doc/docx. I use rtf instead.