Word processing under Linux

[Aq]

I've talked in the show in the past about how I don't think that trying to emulate Word is necessarily the best approach. Would it be possible to build a decent word processor that worked like LyX? So it's a "what you see is what you mean" style document editor? LyX, much like Semantic Web advocates, has the air that you should understand what and why it's doing, but I think that it would be possible to build a LyX-style thing which could still be used for word processing and still be pure, without cloning Word. You see, I don't think we'll ever beat the Word people; they've got a headstart. The way you change things is not by proving yourself incrementally better than the competition; it's by moving the goalposts so people want what your thing does rather than what their current thing does. Look at the rise of, say, webmail: it's pretty much definitely an inferior UI, but people don't care about that becaues it's a different thing from client-side email. I think that it ought to be possible to build a WP that does things in the LyX sort of way -- everything based on styles, say -- and is simple and quick but lets people write documents; Word, and Word-style WPs, are a mess. Thoughts? Why wouldn't this work?

Aq.

[Gomer_X]

The hardest part would be to get the masses to believe the MS Word way is not the best. It seems a techological step back, but the truth is that doing markup is faster and gives more control than WYSIWYG.

I get so frustrated with Word type wordprocessors (OO Writer included), that I resort to writing stuff in HTML. At least then I get what I want. Every time I have to deal with Word's helpful attempts at doing bulleting/numbering for me, I want to slit my wrists. I mean it can't be that hard. It's certainly not intuitive.

Maybe someone could put together something that could read and write OO.org, XML based file format and let you edit the markup directly. It could be a format highlighted text editor like Bluefish. Maybe a switchable mode in AbiWord that puts in colored bold, italic, underline, list tags or whatever. I think there was a word processor on the Commodore 64 called Paperclip that worked this way (you can't do WYSIWYG on a 40 column screen in 64K of RAM).

I've never used Lyx. Maybe it does this. I'm sure there are people out there who are technical enough to use something like this who are tired of fighting a program that does what it thinks they want instead of what they tell it.

[Aq]

The hardest part would be to get the masses to believe the MS Word way is not the best. It seems a techological step back, but the truth is that doing markup is faster and gives more control than WYSIWYG.

Here's the thing. I think you could do it, but you must not mention the word "markup". People do not have to understand how LaTeX (or semantic HTML, or DocBook XML, or whatever) works. They think in terms of styles, and that''d be good. What I think is that LyX goes a reasonable way towards that goal, but you still have to think in LaTeX-ish terms; it just gives you a handy GUI way of applying LaTeX tags to a document. It needs to be more user-friendly than that. Simplicity is the key here. I'm not describing this very well

Aq.

[Gomer_X]

Here's the thing. I think you could do it, but you must not mention the word "markup". People do not have to understand how LaTeX (or semantic HTML, or DocBook XML, or whatever) works. They think in terms of styles, and that''d be good. What I think is that LyX goes a reasonable way towards that goal, but you still have to think in LaTeX-ish terms; it just gives you a handy GUI way of applying LaTeX tags to a document. It needs to be more user-friendly than that. Simplicity is the key here. I'm not describing this very well

Sounds to me like you're asking for something like the styles that already exist in Word and similar programs, but you want them to actually work. In Word I've never attempted to use styles. In OO writer, I closed that box the first time it popped up (and have since StarOffice 5.2) and never opened it again.

We need an easy to use, completely discoverable interface to manipulate text into the form we want. The advantage is I'm sure Microsoft believe Word is perfect. It needs to be intuitive and so easy that people will do it rather than:
1) select text
2) click "bold" button
3) repeat.


I'll often use <CTRL>+B for bold, <CTRL>+U for underline, etcetera. Clearly the current formatting tools are lacking. Maybe when I get time I'll try to actually study up on styles in OO and see what I like and dislike and complain to someone appropriate. I've also recently built a Fedora box for my fiance and just told her "click this icon for word processing," and that was it. She hates computers, but has some writing to do, so It'll be interesting to collect her feedback.

[matthewg42]

The hardest part would be to get the masses to believe the MS Word way is not the best. It seems a techological step back, but the truth is that doing markup is faster and gives more control than WYSIWYG.

Here's the thing. I think you could do it, but you must not mention the word "markup". People do not have to understand how LaTeX (or semantic HTML, or DocBook XML, or whatever) works. They think in terms of styles, and that''d be good. What I think is that LyX goes a reasonable way towards that goal, but you still have to think in LaTeX-ish terms; it just gives you a handy GUI way of applying LaTeX tags to a document. It needs to be more user-friendly than that. Simplicity is the key here. I'm not describing this very well

Aq.

As far as I can tell, this is more or less the goal of LyX, and I think it accomplishes it fairly well. Perhaps the answer is just to continue to develop LyX so that it has more/better GUI tools for the complex parts of documents, so the LaTeX is really hidden away. For example, in my experience the table editing could be a lot nicer.

[matthewg42]

Sounds to me like you're asking for something like the styles that already exist in Word and similar programs, but you want them to actually work. In Word I've never attempted to use styles.

Actually they're amazingly useful. If you ever had the mis-fortune of having to write a large paper with word, and are (as I am in my more anal moments) a stickler for consistency in documentation, you'll get a lot out of it.

I'm amazed how many people use word (and no doubt OO.o writer too), umm, badly. Even something as simple as using a tab or a table to align items on a form is way too often done using spaces which never lines up properly with a non-fixed font.

Not using styles is similar bad practice, and leads to horribly un-maintainable and inconsistent documents. At the very least most people would benefit from using the heading styles - tables of contents then get auto-generated etc.

In OO writer, I closed that box the first time it popped up (and have since StarOffice 5.2) and never opened it again.

Consider re-opening it if you need to write any document over a page or two - you'll thank yourself later.

We need an easy to use, completely discoverable interface to manipulate text into the form we want. The advantage is I'm sure Microsoft believe Word is perfect.

Bah, Microsoft don't care if it's perfect, just if it's sellable, and profitable.

It needs to be intuitive and so easy that people will do it rather than:
1) select text
2) click "bold" button
3) repeat.

I'll often use <CTRL>+B for bold, <CTRL>+U for underline, etcetera. Clearly the current formatting tools are lacking. Maybe when I get time I'll try to actually study up on styles in OO and see what I like and dislike and complain to someone appropriate. I've also recently built a Fedora box for my fiance and just told her "click this icon for word processing," and that was it. She hates computers, but has some writing to do, so It'll be interesting to collect her feedback.

With styles, it's a matter of degree. LyX and such use them for most everything, and you can't not use them - it won't let you. Hell, it won't even let you manually put two spaces after a full stop - it does typesetting and style things, not the writer, and if the template is appropriate, it generally does them prettier than manual efforts, and always more consistently.

But most people want more flexibility. I bet about 50% of all word documents are just used to put some text next to a picture in an editable file. often some daft picture and a quippy comment, mailed to everyone in the office... So long as everyone it's sent to has word, this is a solution to the the task of bundling pictures, formatted text, and tables.

By the way, does RTF allow embedded pictures?

So perhaps the solution is something with similar capabilities to OO.o writer, but with styles "turned on by default" and enforces their use unless the user explicitly turns them off (maybe uses a special style called "freestyle" or something like that).

[Gomer_X]

I looked at Lyx a bit. Good idea in a lot of ways, but the Latex backend is a negative. Something like that with a better backend would be nice. Maybe it can be made to write to XML?

My point about not using styles was: If I turn them off in Word/OO Writer, they're too complicated for the average user. If someone rejects the MS Word way and comes up with a better interface - something that's too simple or intuitive not to use - they've got a winner.

I have to laugh that I've invested hours in learning to do obscure things with Vim, but to learn styles in OO has been too much trouble (so far).

[Woo]

Aq,

Is this what you are looking for?

Conglomerate. http://www.conglomerate.org/

[Woo]

You aren't going back far enough by talking about styles. All that belongs in the 'source document' are words and a description of structure - It's a book, this is the title, it is split up into these chunks etc.

Completely seperately you define a presentation - a) it's a web site in the company house style, the background is this, include the new stuff here.
b) (there are always 2) Same content - It's a magazine article in the publishers standard format.

Take the source, run it through the 2 appropriate 'processors' and the final documents pop out. Conglomerate gives you the source. Tool chains give you the 'processors'.

You can't do this with a WYSIWYG word processor because you don't necessarily know what you want to see yet. Styles are a messy combination of part structural information and partial layout detail. I've never seen a Word document that contains sufficient information that it could automatically be converted to DocBook.

The only significant weakness I've seen in DocBook is that you have to say e.g.'this is a level 3 title' whereas I think you nearly always want to say 'this is a title at (the same, +1, -1) level.

[Aq]

Aq,

Is this what you are looking for?

Conglomerate. http://www.conglomerate.org/

No. Conglomerate is for DocBook heads. Yeah, they say "it makes it easy", but what it does is make it easy to write DocBook. A laudable goal, but not my goal. Imagine giving it to your next-door-neighbour when he says "I want to write a letter to my mate"...

Aq.

[Nightwish]

that's why there are styles import, document templates...
NIH sindrome, people.

[Squozen]

The 'it's not Word' mental resistance is definitely a huge issue. Witness Apple's launch of Pages, which looks beautiful and appears very simple to use, yet was completely ignored by the marketplace who continued buying Office.

Open Office already does the Word thing, is anybody actually asking for something that works differently to Word? Serious question, not flamebait.

[pel]

As Gomer_X writes, the problem is with the users.

I've taught TeX/LaTex and a bit of DocBook for three years and the single thing that bother most CS-students is that "It won't display things the way I want it too". Some, like 5% of the students, grasp that the type setting system actually knows type setting far better than anyone there does. The other ones just go back to using Word/OO.o/Abi/What ever 'because $foo program does things right'.

Offcourse it's the same 5% that grasp the concept of styles in wordprocessors. The rest of the students ends up (after the course - they fail if they do it this way in the actual course) with individually formated headlines and stuff like that. They never use the automatic index/contents generator (since they don't use styles) - hence their essays gets horribly broken - giving both the students themselves and the proffesors a headache.

The reason I know these statistics is because that I actually followed up on my students and talked to some of their teachers.

So - what do we do?
Personally, I'm for whipping people until they learn; but I guess that won't be too popular with the human rights possey

Lets face it. People are dumb.
Unless someone comes up with some sort of AI approach to this we're basicly screwed. Or are we? We know what we prefer ourselves. Just keep on using that technology.

The day I stop using LaTeX is the day you grab my emacs away from my dead cold.. er.. fingers..

ps
I must admit it, I use wordprocessors. I'm ashamed.
Interoperability made me do it ;(
ds

[Woo]

Aq,

Is this what you are looking for?

Conglomerate. http://www.conglomerate.org/

No. Conglomerate is for DocBook heads. Yeah, they say "it makes it easy", but what it does is make it easy to write DocBook. A laudable goal, but not my goal. Imagine giving it to your next-door-neighbour when he says "I want to write a letter to my mate"...

Aq.

You're doing it again! A letter is just a stylistic convention. I think your neighbours wants 'to communicate with' his mate. He wants to address his communication, write some chunks (let's call them paragraphs) and say who it comes from. Later he can decide whether to process it into a letter, an email, an SMS message or voice mail. All that's needed is a standard framework for selecting a presentation style instead of a resident expert to create a custom style-sheet. A 'letter' is a perfect example of what Conglomerate should be good at if someone wrote document types in addition to the existing 'Set', 'Book' or 'Article' e.g. 'Informal letter'. If the DocBook standards would stay still for long enough then it might happen.

I'd like to see a back-end added into Conglomerate that pushed the code produced down a selected tool-chain pipe.

[Aq]

Aq,

Is this what you are looking for?

Conglomerate. http://www.conglomerate.org/

No. Conglomerate is for DocBook heads. Yeah, they say "it makes it easy", but what it does is make it easy to write DocBook. A laudable goal, but not my goal. Imagine giving it to your next-door-neighbour when he says "I want to write a letter to my mate"...

Aq.

You're doing it again! A letter is just a stylistic convention. I think your neighbours wants 'to communicate with' his mate. He wants to address his communication, write some chunks (let's call them paragraphs) and say who it comes from. Later he can decide whether to process it into a letter, an email, an SMS message or voice mail. All that's needed is a standard framework for selecting a presentation style instead of a resident expert to create a custom style-sheet. A 'letter' is a perfect example of what Conglomerate should be good at if someone wrote document types in addition to the existing 'Set', 'Book' or 'Article' e.g. 'Informal letter'. If the DocBook standards would stay still for long enough then it might happen.

Nah. You see, people don't get the underlying stuff. If they did, they'd be using LyX rather than Word already. What I'm talking about is something that does what LyX does but *doesn't need you to understand the underlying stuff*. I'm not clear that this is possible, I admit.

Aq.