cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42401713
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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I consider myself a Word power user. I've spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I've designed professional corporate template suites in it.
I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again.
It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can't delete if you don't need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are "font themes" which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them.
I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren't much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamentally level.
I haven't seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, L^A^T~E~X for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.
I know that workflow style is good for like dissertations and academic journal articles, but the sort of templates I have to design and work in are more splashy and dramatic. The look and structure is more akin to what you see in artsy magazines and books—pages with dark background colors, decorative stock images, vector shapes, etc. Can Latex be used for that?
Ah, it's not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it's doable.