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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42401713
My worst experience in Word has been adapting a state based Word document to municipal use. The state knows what it is doing and uses styles as a great way to organize the document to provide direction.
Then the fucking county had a 60 year old secretary create a wrapper for that document and it fucking breaks everything.
"This page is intentionally left blank."
Well it's not fucking blank anymore then, is it??
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.
You didn't even mention the ribbon lol.
I actually like the ribbon UI compared to what came before. Jensen Harris from the office design team way back in 2008 gave this talk about how they invented the ribbon:
Yeah, word processors are garbage.
Oddly, Google Docs is the least junky one, probably because JS had a bunch of limitations at the time it was started, and Google had to limit the features.
I’ve been pretty happy with Pandoc, some LaTeX, and scripts. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.
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.
You cannot control where pictures occur within a text body in latex, it decides for you. You can give it recommendations, but it’ll figure out the final alignment when rendering to page. I’m not sure that’s a limitation you want for design-focused use cases.
And if you want to do something seriously nice you need to code a it in latex’s reverse Polish notation code language from hell, let me tell you latex ain’t the future of ease haha
I would not use latex for any document that should be a template for other people to fill in. Unless you're a peer reviewed journal.
I wouldn't use latex for anything that requires precise positioning of images and elements. InDesign and similar are a much better option.
I do like to use markdown for any document that does not fall into those categories. I like to use latex for any document I'm writing which I want someone else to style.
Latex is very cool for styling, but in my experience most of the time you do not really need that amount of configurability and the added time to correctly make a styled document in latex is way more than what it would take you in word, even when you have to fight word to make it. That is unless you need equations, but then again: just write markdown with latex equations.
God the style presets in OnlyOffice are driving me insane. Sometimes they apply, and change the style accordingly, sometimes not. Sometimes they need a double click to apply all of the styling. They reset with any page formatting change. The list is comically absurdly long, and yeah, some aren't deletable. What the fuck are T1 through T94? Why can't I just create a few custom header and footer styles for my document? It's just a piece of fiction. It doesn't need 307 different header styles, and every possible variation of footnote, goddamn.
When I have to work on docx I generally can do it with LibreOffice and I'm quite happy with that. Sometimes I can not, I had for example this pesky thing which wouldn't let me edit parts of the document as it was locked, especially on tables. No amount of conversations across file formats fixes that for some reason.
That is when I have to open up the office365 webpage. What a fucking piece of garbage. Most things you mention do not even exist in there. You can write a document and add comments, managing styles is already a bit too much for the yearly fee they charge you.
I hope they make it possible again to install the office suite on Linux.
And in no way I'm saying I like LibreOffice better than word, they're both quite terrible; but at least one of them runs on my system.
Basically a lightweight markup (instead of xml) in a container to carry media and styles with it?
What You See Is What You Get we mumble to ourselves, a mantra we remember the words to but have forgotten the meaning of.
WYSIWYG doesn't state there is any way to make it look like what you want. Just that it won't change on you afterwards
but what happens if we change on it afterwards...
What you see is not what you wanted.
Enable hidden characters, find any odd breaks or empty paragraphs, remove them.
¶
Edit: damn the pilcrow renders shit on my phone
Well damn, today I learned it has a name!
What, the paragraph symbol? I'll add that to the list of useless words to pull out in strange situations just to show off to people I know them.
Same!
Somehow my boss at my last job added a page break that didn’t show up when I turned on show hidden characters. It took me about six hours to figure out how to remove the final blank page. Online help forums were useless because he did it in such an unusual way. Looking back, even I think that surely I must have been mistaken because it’s too absurd that it would be that hard to delete a page, but I vividly remember turning on the hidden characters and getting nowhere.
Usually I try going to the end of the previous page and hold delete and hope it goes away.
It is fun if you use fancy formatting with columns, and somehow the anchor character doesn't show up on the ghost page even with hidden characters on, and you give up and choose 11.8pt font to make the page go away.
I miss ClarisWorks 2 and 3. Best office suites ever made.
While we're hating on Word, can someone tell me why MS Office products insist on opening documents in a 16:9 rectangle and also changing the previously last used Word doc I opened to 16:9 as well? Like, not only will it not let me open a new document in the window size I want, but it also insists on fucking me over on my other Word documents that I've set up the way I want.
Every other application I use keeps the last window size I used. It's crazy. Have I missed a setting?
Trying to explain to my wife that millennials are the most technologically savvy generation in history, but she just keeps yelling back "give me the Netflix password, the TV won't turn on"
Meanwhile Gen Alpha:
"What is Word??"
I get the joke but tbh this comes across as boomer humor
Nope, neither a joke, nor Boomer.
GenX with late GenZ and early GenAlpha kids.
So no humor, just empiric observation.
Just this week my GenZ son told me to my astonishment, that out of his class of 30, only 3 still have a printer at home.
For my daughter in elementary school it is even worse.
Mobile phones and tablets essentially have completely replaced PCs and Laptops at home.
First time the kids come in contact with a text processing program is sometime during secondary school in class if they are lucky.
So my oldest is almost to the point where I’m going to want them to have something for schoolwork and writing. They use a classroom Chromebook at school, but I have no idea what would make sense for them here at home. I’m an engineer who daily drives Linux, so I’m probably overthinking it. I do have an old laptop that will easily handle a lightweight distro, and as long as I don’t give them sudo it will probably be ok? Though I haven’t looked at parental controls for Linux accounts.
What do you recommend?
I am also an engineer, so my kids have had contact with advanced IT equipment since early childhood and are quite proficient by now. :-)
We also have a Chromebook with touchscreen at home, mainly so they can comfortably use some Android apps in a controlled environment (the 9 yo doesn't yet have a smartphone of her own). Chromebooks in school are not really a thing here in Germany afaik.
Both kids have an account on our Linux desktop in our work/office room.
This is set up with a special German DNS that provides age-group appropriate filtered hostlists ("jusprog").
To integrate that I used dnsmasq, which lets me easily modify the filters if needed.
It's not perfect, as it could be easily circumvented, but we talk openly about it and I try to minimize severe restrictions, so they feel no need to tamper with it.
The kids are sometimes a little annoyed when something new doesn't work directly, but know that this is the way that allows them to use the PC relative freely, so they are quite happy with the arrangement for now.
We also have a Linux Laptop and a tiny Mini-PC with Linux Mint attached to the TV, both of which they are only allowed to use with some supervision.
Edit:
They have some games that can be used with their accounts (the usual, Luanti, Supertux, Tuxracer).
The more complex Games are on a special account for which they don't have the password themselves, but have to ask for access.
Older kid just got really involved in playing Oblivion, so proud! ;-)
Archaic shit.
The trick is to not use word
Lotus WordPro or bust
WYSIWYM for the win
I mean I want the picture on page 2 [!Hb] not that hbox is overfull and thus picture is on page 10.
Ctrl-a, del ought to do it
Then Ctrl -s, ctrl-x to be safe.
This is a joke in case anyone really thinks this will do it. Don't do this, it will delete your entire document. So technically it will remove blank pages 😁 but at what cost?
My problem is usually how to NOT delete the blank page because I put it there on purpose, but any moment I delete something I end up going too far and having to add it again, but then try trim some of the extra trailing lines and there we go again.
I usually just put the cursor behind the last word on the previous page, hold shift and click just at the end of the white space. Then press delete. Usually works.