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!
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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
@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?
@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
@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
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).