i'm in the copyediting phase of my next book
which means i now have to use Word, since it's what the entire workflow at my publisher uses
oh my god what a dreadful, *dreadful* piece of software
it's like syphilis, except for word processing
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@david_chisnall
That’s super cool!
Amusingly, it turned out my publisher had budget for typesetting, and so paid me to do the typesetting as well for one of the books.
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@clive After discovering LaTeX, I never went back. What do you mean I can just keep typing and content and the output is beautiful*
*It takes some serious upfront work to get there
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@grumpasaurus @clive Oh, that’s interesting! I guess I was thinking of something more mainstream…
@grumpasaurus @clive Maybe. I could see that argument. But Craiglist doesn’t feel exactly as modern (the positive parts) as it could, and I don’t think it was ever a paragon of good UI?
@clive There's nowt wrong with Word, lad! It put the kids through college!
@clive it's so odd that they use Word, and it is what people use, but there are so many better applications to do this type of work with that would actually get you closer to a print-ready document.
i have inveighed at *numbing length* to my editor about this
hell, I could probably craft an obsdian workflow that would do everything they need, and more easily
among other things, the chapters could be independent-but-linked files so you wouldn't have endure the teetering, staggering behavior of Word trying to manage a single bolus of 120,000 words
@clive i have built that, it's how i remade these books from 120 years ago. https://bookstore.ninja
oh lemme check this out, cool!!
i can feel it groan and heave every time I start it up
i actually feel kind of *bad* for Word -- it has to be backwards compatible with pretty much every file type since mesopotamian cunieform ...
... and it has all this crazy junk dna of all the features crammed in there that are never/rarely used -- formatting obscure mailer-sticker sizings, outputting html, etc
it's such a creaking, processor-heavy mess
the lights dim on my entire block when i boot it up
@clive The ones who really deserve sympathy are the Q/A engineers who have to test all that obscure nonsense. They have to know encyclopedically what "correct behavior" really means in all those edge cases.
yes, very much so
@clive And yet LibreOffice can handle more file formats, outputs to more formats, and so on without more than a momentary local flicker.
@clive What’s the worst part these days?
difficult to say, but i'm now being forced by the production people to input all my endnotes, and wow it just is *struggling* to zip back and forth in a 120,000 word doc as it moves to and fro
I have a *wildly* powerful desktop, yet it's word is still staggering around like a tired and heavily-laden backpacker as i do this
I definitely thought of working out some sort of a workflow like that
I’ve just decided to bite the bullet and endure the next month and a half of working with Word
But it was tempting
@clive So it's a hard and specific requirement that you suffer using this specific piece of software, you are not allowed to do all the work in some other competent software tool and just import the almost-ready document and tweak only to give finishing touches?
I certainly could work in a different format and imported in, but in practice, there are oodles of tiny little tweaks the production people have in place on their end …. and I strongly doubt I’d be able to capture them all – I’m not even sure what they are
@clive @mwichary ohhh that was the worst part of my manuscript too. Working in Word was so bad that I finished my manuscript in Notion, spat out .md files, then did some wizardry to compile into a Word doc. Maybe that’ll help you? Also, congrats and good luck!
https://joshuagraves.me/writing/journal/code/#markdown-to-word-conversion
I definitely thought of doing something like that!
The problem is, I’m in the fact-checking phase, where I take the copy edited manuscript that they’ve generated on their end (in Word) and input all the fact changes I’ve generated on my end
It’s not a process amenable to automation, because you have to think carefully about how to integrate each fact fix
@clive Thanks for sharing. And good luck!
I wonder what’s the best example of a long-lived piece of software that didn’t suffer from this kind of a bloat through continued maintenance efforts… if it exists at all.
@mwichary @clive Things (https://things.app) and Bear (https://bear.app) come to mind as great examples.
@simontatham@hachyderm.io’s PuTTY comes to mind. https://putty.org
@clive iMessage on iOS?
Notepad on windows and text edit on macos are pretty good and not too screwed-with after all these years
@clive I feel Notepad got some improvements, but TextEdit is just kind of forgotten, probably just improved as much as it needs to to recompile again. In the perfect world TextEdit would get some light improvements to bring it up to par with some more modern typing or OS habits – some of that stuff that Notes received over the years. In my opinion!
one example of a piece of longtime software that i) hasn't been left to rot; in fact it ii) has been continually updated and improved, yet iii) not enshittified with AI?
Logic Pro, the music production software for macos
it is *phenomenal*. It's literally *why* I shifted from a windows laptop to a mac one in 2010
I'd struggled with pro tools for a decade, could never provide enough ram/cpu to keep it happy
logic pro has been a nonstop joy
@clive Someone else mentioned Logic Pro! I have never used it?!??
possibly the most wonderful piece of software I've ever used
it has an astonishing blend of intuitive -- not in the "we're dumbing this down" sense, but "you can infer the function of something based on its placement and UI even if it's new to you"; just *fabulous* cognitive ergonomics -- and deep/powerful
no other piece of software I use comes close
like, I love scrivener, but its UI -- while mostly very good -- has its weird, cryptic byways
logic has none
@clive @mwichary
Ah. I see you don’t use external MIDI sound modules.
Or attempt to edge-edit audio regions.
Or express any sense of mystery as to when Logic selects a single region in a track after recording, or all regions in that track so that if you press Delete you don’t know what you’re deleting.
Or… or…I can go on at significant length. Logic is great; I use it for a number of projects. But it does have pain points. Many, many pain points.
@clive What’s your go-to word processor?
I write most of my books and long-form journalism in Scrivener
i"ve dabbled with obsidian, it's very good, but I have a crap ton of muscle memory for Scrivener so that's my go-to
I do use google docs a bunch when I need to collaborate with editors, but I don't prefer to write in it
@clive
I’ve managed to push back against Word for all of my books. My first four were with Pearson and I did my own typesetting with LaTeX and avoided Word. The first one was before anyone had computer editing flows and the copyeditor printed it out, wrote copyediting marks on it and sent it back (I learned to read copyediting marks for that one and have never seen one since). The later ones they marked up a PDF. The quid pro quo for this was that I took responsibility for merging the fixes. The big benefit for me was that the publisher never had access to the text in an editable format, so couldn’t screw it up.
My last one, I built the flow to let me write semantic markup and generate print PDFs, online PDFs, web and ePub editions. Since my company was publishing it, the copyeditor worked directly for me. I taught her to use GitHub and she reviewed the raw markup (reading the PDFs). It took a few weeks for her to get comfortable with this flow but then it was very productive (she’d raise PRs with a mix of inline comments and changes, we’d discuss some of them and update the PR, then I’d merge them).