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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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
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 And yet LibreOffice can handle more file formats, outputs to more formats, and so on without more than a momentary local flicker.
openoffice too
@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
@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.
@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 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.