this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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I just think Microsoft Word is actively making the entire world less efficient. It's not made to produce documents that are easy to read. Don't have an obvious contender though. LibreOffice Writer just tries to be the same shitty product but free, LaTeX is way too technical and has horrible error handling. Markdown usability and quality breaks down if you make any serious use of tables and figures.
Since I'm not a US citizen I also think it's a threat to our country that our entire administration and every company is dependent on storing documents in an effectively proprietary format controlled by a US company, on cloud servers controlled by a US company. If compelled by the US government, Microsoft could put all of EU to a halt with the flick of a switch. National security calls for formats as central as this to be open standards supported by multiple competing products.
Markdown accomplishes 90% of non technical writing needs imo.
I keep taking about wanting to use markdown files for contacts and policies at work, stored in reports repos for change tracking. The problem is always "the legal team isn't going to use Git". What I'd love to see is a front end for Git that allows direct markdown editing and emulates the Track Changes feature in Word.
What about hedgedoc?
That looks interesting, thanks! I'll check it out too see if it might be suitable.
i agree. and for the rest, roff and latex do great
Couldn't agree more. Tried OnlyOffice? Lovely suite . Markdown is amazing, I am writing a web book & PDF version with the same source. Did LaTeX, but it was just so cumbersome.
Sorry, I can see from the first screenshot on their web site that OnlyOffice is not conducive to legibility. A user interface that promotes direct control of the typeface (instead of styling rules based on semantic tags) is going to produce inconsistent documents.
User interfaces should be designed to make it easy to do things right, and difficult to do things wrong. This UI encourages people to produce crap.
Their other screenshots further show that they do not care about things like appropriate margin size or inter-word spacing, leaving me with little trust in the product.
Agreed. This UI is very much inherited from ancient word processing applications. The shift that Microsoft made in the Vista era to the tabbed menu buttons only added extra mouse clicks to get to the same set of functions. Word and LibreOffice both allow you to do the kind of thing you're talking about, but those features are nestled way down into menus and trays that are ugly and hard to use and promote the use of the wrong tool since the wrong tool is made more accessible.
Onlyoffice works with microsoft ooxml standards by default, in other words, promoting them and encouraging its use. OOXML is everything but efficient. OpenDocument, instead, which is used by LibreOffice by default, is the open and efficient standard.
Give LyX a try. It's like writing TeX in a much more friendly way.