Nick Harkaway: It’s getting to the point where the publishing industry should probably be looking at alternatives to its frankly pathological dependency on Microsoft Word.

It’s getting to the point where the publishing industry should probably be looking at alternatives to its frankly pathological dependency on Microsoft Word.

Seriously: if your model relies on IP, you can’t really source your digital infrastructure from an entity whose stated policy is that IP is garbage.

Any microsoft applications that I find on the open web is freeware. Got it.

Yes! Used WordPerfect back in the day and would use it again if it was acceptable. Corel still sells it.

techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/h...

How Microsoft helped imprison a man for 'counterfeiting' software it gives away for free | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com In a sickening concession to bad copyright law and Microsoft's bottom line over basic technical truths and common sense, Eric Lundgren will spend 15 months in prison for selling discs that let people ...

Ohhh, I remember.

No-one has spotted yet that I use LibreOffice. The MS Word obsession was a revelation to me when I started creative writing. B2B interfaced industries which publish large volumes don't do this, instead relying on strict XML formats using DTD/XSD within a variety of compliant vendor publishing tools.

I’ve had some issues with the various Word-alikes in the context of tracked changes and comments - but I haven’t tried for a while.

I think compatibility was dodgy with MS Word 2007 but later versions of both word processors seem to function OK.

To prevent any issues it's a good idea to retain odf (odt) copies of files to revert to and save as docx after any tracked changes are made.

Google Docs is just as bad. There really isn't a great alternative unless you use a Mac. I have to use Word because track changes doesn't go across software and my clients use it. So I've never really looked at Pages...

Open Office and Libre Office are usable, but again, *everyone* in your chain has to use the same software.

And they are mainly copies of MS Office.

Right. Because MS has really dominated the market.

"You get what you pay for" never rang more true.

I mean, Word is really good in a lot of ways. It’s just that MS is making it unreasonably risky to use it.

I really dislike it, especially now that it's shackled to their online ecosystem. I had a thing the other day where I needed access to a document someone sent me and this happened. For hours.

But even otherwise: Word doesn't love novel-length files with a bunch of comments, which is kind of an issue when the industry uses it for editing. Mellel is actually built for that and works fine with heavy comment ballast, but it's not "the standard" so no one uses it. Round and round we go...

None of that remotely matters in this context, though. If it was PERFECT for novels, you'd still have to look twice if this is the company attitude to the legal substrate of your company.

I am increasingly hitting Word limits w/my game manuscript, which is heavily formatted, with a lot of cross-references and TOCs based on differing styles. There's times where it starts taking 2-3 seconds per character typed. I restart it, it works OK, then not. What is "Mellel"?

Mellel.com - a text editor/word processor designed for academic and novel writing. Very good.

Mellelmellel.com

👀 can you go back and forth with a commented/track-changed document without things getting strange? (ie someone sends me a word doc, I manage to deal with everything in Mellel and then export back out to send to them? Or does that introduce weird glitches?)

Looks like it's Mac only.

I mean as a general-purpose word processor. I’m sure there’s something better for your specific profession. Over here in math, we literally code up our papers in LaTeX for a reason.

i switched last week to Nisus Writer Pro (a Mac word processor) due to a persistent issue I was having with Word not saving my manuscript file. This guy is just a short step from saying anything created in Office is fair game for AI training.

Maybe you shouldn’t put words in other ppl’s mouths but pay attention to what they actually say: I enjoy Word’s general purpose functionality (not for long manuscripts—for that I’d personally use LaTeX). And I’m upset b/c it looks like I have to quit it for personal use soonish.

i wasn't referring to you.

Never has Google's sound advice, offered during network problems but equally helpful in a zombie apocalypse, been more relevant: "Something went wrong. Please reload"

do real people use word? i thought all the serious stuff was done in tex these days

The entire publishing industry workflow relies on Word and the Adobe suite. Well maybe not academic publishing, I don’t know about those guys

Yes, academic journals - esp. scientific ones with lots of equations - do tend to prefer LaTex.

I figured, it would be a nightmare to do all the scientific stuff in Word.

I had to deal with a guy once who was INCREDULOUS that I was using a word processor+InDesign workflow instead of Latex to publish, outing himself as a person who has apparently never seen a normal book

Academic publishing is so completely alien in every way; I do kind of look at stories about it like tales from Mars

I've never even heard of what you just said

What no Humanities does to a mfer

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