User talk:Maury Markowitz/Manifesto for a Better Word Processor

Ever tried LyX? Allright, maybe LaTeX-based software is not everyone's cup of tea, but personally I like it very much. WYSIWYM rules and LyX certainly does styles very well! 84.144.111.54 16:05, 10 July 2006 (UTC)


 * LaTeX has its places. The whole symbolic text processing thing is largely unknown in the modern world. People shout and yell about separating content and presentation in the (X)HTML/CSS universe but not in the word processing.


 * Frankly, even with LaTeX we still need a tool for:
 * outlining and organizing the material
 * doing the actual writing
 * annotating, collaborating and editing
 * tracking changes people have made in the document
 * viewing the document on screen


 * Word processing is not a simple problem. User needs differ too much. No-one uses more than 10% of the features of Microsoft Word, but people use different features.


 * For example, I need the review functionality (track changes, show who did them), unicode support, Finnish spell checking, and Finnish hyphenation. Outlining mode, thesaurus and unobtrusive user interface are quite nice too. And hopefully it never crashes. Ever. Not while I am trying to type in something creative and extremely hard to catch.


 * OpenOffice Writer is very nice but it does not have the Draft/Normal view. Outlining without the Outline view is also quite painful.


 * -- Talamus 21:50, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Do not forget the enlightenment of The Zen of Programming :

Hearing a disturbance, the master programmer went into the novice's cubicle.

"Curse these personal computers!" cried the novice in anger, "To make them do anything I must use three or even four editing programs. Sometimes I get so confused that I erase entire files. This is truly intolerable!"

The master programmer stared at the novice. "And what would you do to remedy this state of affairs?" he asked.

The novice thought for a moment. "I will design a new editing program," he said, "a program that will replace all these others."

Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head. It was not a heavy blow, but the novice was nonetheless surprised. "What did you do that for?" exclaimed the novice.

"I have no wish to learn another editing program," said the master.

And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

Mike (talk) 07:39, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Out of interest, how do you feel web-based editors like Google Docs have addressed some of these issues? Exports pretty reasonable HTML (albeit not fully human-readable), overcomes the 'save document in progress' issue etc.

Mediaczar (talk) 08:27, 12 February 2021 (UTC)