Simplify: Word Processing Edition
on 01.06.08, 08:36pm in simplify • comments (4)
[Steven Poole via NYT] For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?
Interesting read by Steven Poole on his love of the simplicity of WriteRoom and his purging of Word from his toolset.
Edge (January 6, 2008 @ 9:30 pm)
This is incredibly stupid. Word has been purged by most people. They don’t realize it. Who writes word documents? Nobody. Today people write e-mail and store it on their mail server and share it by sending it around. Mail has replaced Word and “word processors” years ago.
Kees Leune (January 7, 2008 @ 6:03 am)
When I wrote my PhD thesis (and many other reports, articles, and even slide presentations), I used vi for editing and LaTeX for formatting. Vi is non-surpassed for editing text files (disregard what the Emacs people say:) and has been around forever. LaTeX makes for really, professionally formatted, documents. It takes some getting used to let LaTeX decide where your figures go, rather than having to worry about hitting ‘enter’ in the wrong spot and messing up your carefully crafted layout, but the end-result is so much nicer than anything I have ever produced with Word!
Using vi (like WriteRoom, I suspect) lets you focus on text, rather than on structure. As Edge said, email has replaced a lot of writing, but I would argue that most email does not constitute anything written, rather a blurb of ASCII characters (or UTF-8) representing some kind of brain convulsion, and that most email that is written is not of the same volume and/or quality as articles or books are.
mattbg (January 7, 2008 @ 10:03 am)
You can, of course, put Word in Normal layout mode and use it full screen to get the same effect. Most, if not all, of the distractions can be turned off.
mattbg (January 7, 2008 @ 2:19 pm)
Edge… you’re omitting whole worlds of business and process documentation, and academic research that benefits from all of the features in something like Word (Word’s features do not exist for no reason). You may not need Word at home, but, then, Word is not priced for the home market. There are many valid reasons for Word’s existence.
It’s only the uneducated and illiterate that try to replace word processors with e-mail in that context. Anyway, I don’t get it… use Notepad or one of the many excellent text editors out there if you don’t care about formatting and structure.
Kees seems to have got by with ‘vi’ and LaTeX… which sounds like a common computer science solution, but you’d never hand it to a sociologist and ask him to do his thesis on something like that.