> I'm having enough trouble with MSWord.
One of the happier days of my life so far was when I left a job where
I had to use MSWord every day - often with embedded MSExcel
spreadsheets - and started one where I never had to use it at all.
I still make documents of various kinds, but I make them with
markdown/pandoc or, if fancy maths symbols are required, Lyx.
WYSIWYG *doesn't work*, and is one of the grossest errors in the
history of computing.
Why doesn't WYSIWYG work? Because there's a mismatch between the
grammar of interaction and the grammar of definition. Everything
maddening about working with MSWord (or any other word processor that
doesn't let you get behind the what-you-see and edit its markup) comes
from this mismatch. For example: there are things you can't see, that
disrupt the formatting of the things you can see. Much
MSWord-finagling consists of jiggling things about in order to force
the invisibly-disrupting things to reveal themselves, so that they can
be properly banished. People spend hours of their lives doing this. No
wonder userland is so full of magical thinking.
Dominic
|