I spend a fair amount of time writing: the blog is a hobby. Like Charles Stross, I use a variety of tools: wordpress for blogging, emacs or Lyx for long documents, and at times LibreOffice. Most of the time I communicate with other by making acrobat files or plain text.
But journal editors want word. Libreoffice can massage files into word format, but I don’t think like that. I want a markup language. I want it to be beautiful. emacs and latex or lyx — work. Charles Stross has the same problem — and he makes all his money from money.
Nor is Microsoft Word easy to use. Its interface is convoluted, baroque, making the easy difficult and the difficult nearly impossible to achieve. It guarantees job security for the guru, not transparency for the zen adept who wishes to focus on the task in hand, not the tool with which the task is to be accomplished. It imposes its own concept of how a document should be structured upon the writer, a structure best suited to business letters and reports (the tasks for which it is used by the majority of its users). Its proofing tools and change tracking mechanisms are baroque, buggy, and inadequate for true collaborative document preparation; its outlining and tagging facilities are piteously primitive compared to those required by a novelist or thesis author: and the procrustean dictates of its grammar checker would merely be funny if the ploddingly sophomoric business writing style it mandates were not so widespread.
But this isn’t why I want Microsoft Office to die.
The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it’s an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon.
I suggest Plain text and latex. If not, open text documents: an open format.
UPDATE.
A commentator at Charlie’s place reminded us all that Microsoft word was not always bloated.
Hey, I love Microsoft Word! By which I mean Word 5.1 for Macintosh, which next month will be old enough to vote. It does all the formatting a writer needs, it has a spiffy outliner, it never crashes, and above all it’s damn fast. I’m going to be sad when my PowerPC Mac finally dies and I can’t run it anymore.
For my books I need to use Unicode, so at some point I sigh and copy everything into a more modern Word, which is slow, bloated, and regularly crashes.
I agree. I remember using Word on macs and it worked very nicely, as Stross notes.
I agree completely: Word 5.1a for MacOS did not suck. (It wasn’t bloated by modern standards, either: the entire installation came on three 1.44Mb floppies.)
Unfortunately, it’s been downhill all the way since then, and that’s a product they shipped in 1991 .
Having said that, Word 5.1 had about as much functionality as the processor that is integrated into wordpress, and I usually have that switched off and edit raw text. It is going to end up being parsed by some web browser. In the end, the word document is not the final product: the printed book, ebook file or html is.
