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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@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 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.
@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!
@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
