El Reg reports:
In August last year, one-time-sysadmin and now SciFi author Charles Stross declared Microsoft Word "a tyrant of the imagination" and bemoaned its use in the publishing world.
"Major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems," he wrote. "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."
Now another prominent British SciFi author, Alastair Reynolds, has voiced more or less the same sentiments.
Reynolds kicked off with this missive:Another shit feature of Word that's driving me to distraction: http://t.co/wqnxB2sLbl
-- Alastair Reynolds (@AquilaRift) August 24, 2014The link in Reynolds' Tweet goes to a Microsoft support page titled Scroll bar in word 2013 freezes. I need to move mouse to be able to scroll it. What is causing the problem?
A bit of Twitter banter followed Reynolds' Tweet, during which he explained he can't ditch the software unless an alternative "... can handle collaborative mark-up in the same way as Word, though, it's no good for the later stages."
Which sounds an awful lot like the same complaint Stross voiced: the publishing industry is so into Word he'd like to work in another tool, but his editors prefer he uses the Microsoft tool.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:06AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:14AM
True, but is it the same markup that Word uses? And can you Mark up in one, convert to the other, then mark up in that, and convert back?
Because if you can't do that, and you are not in a position to force the other party to use your tool, you have to use theirs.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:40AM
1. Pardon? How come the other party is in the position to force me to use their tool?
2. (irrespective of the answer to Q1) is there something wrong with me not liking to use their tool and expressing my displeasure publicly? Is it wrong for me to even suggest other tools?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @09:11AM
They provide a service you depend on, require the tool inorder to provide that service, and you cannot easily switch to another provider of the same service which doesn't require you to use that tool, be it that there is no other viable provider, be it that all other viable providers also force you to use that tool, be it that some contract prevents you from switching to another provider, or be it that the cost of switching providers would be too high.
A simple example: Imagine that for some reason you don't like TCP/IP. Now you want to use an online encyclopaedia using another protocol. Of course you are in principle free to reject TCP/IP for whatever reason; there's no law that forces you to use it. However you'll probably be hard pressed to find a provider who gives you access to an online encyclopaedia using anything else but TCP/IP.
Of course not.
No. However it is also not wrong for others to point out that the tool you suggest may not be a solution in that specific case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @01:21PM
And vice versa.
Sometimes it would even be easier for a good and well-known author to find another publisher than it would be for that publisher to find another equally good author to write the book. Especially if it's a series of books and the original author can claim that the characters and locations are his or her intellectual property.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday August 26 2014, @10:13AM
Yes, at least to a proof-of-concept level. I've never used the feature on a big job with multiple round trips (but in my experience even Word starts bombing out at that point).
Trouble is, LibreOffice isn't necessarily the solution to the problem - its still a large, complex word processor, largely a clone of MS Office-some-time-in-the-late-90s with half-baked DTP features thrown in and a stack of bugs and features. I'd summarise it as 'differently annoying' to Word, with its greatest feature being that you don't need to pay $200 for the privilege of being annoyed.
There's a bit of dissonance in what is being asked for, here: a stripped-down 'concentrate-on-the-words' word processor for authors (without all the feature bloat and consequent complexity that is the root cause of many of these bugs and features) but with multi-user change control (which, for many others, is part of said feature bloat).
In this case, Since Alastair Reynolds has a Physics PhD, its a fair bet that he'd rather use vim & LaTeX along with something like git for the revision control... however, those tools are very much written by nerds for nerds. The problem is, if you collaborate, you have to use the lowest common denominator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:46AM
It can't handle very large documents well though (unless hanging for 10+ minutes when opening them is considered OK nowadays, word opens them in mere seconds).
(Score: 1) by tniemi on Tuesday August 26 2014, @09:23AM
Please see:
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=4914 [apache.org]
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37967 [freedesktop.org]
Please also note, that the original request was made 2002-05-15 20:11:39 UTC
(Score: 3, Informative) by tniemi on Tuesday August 26 2014, @09:52AM
The "best of" compilation of "normal/draft mode missing" comments
Year 2002, the beginning:
Year 2007:
Year 2007:
Year 2008:
Year 2008:
Year 2011:
Year 2014, the present (12 years later):
And here is SELECT * FROM [All OpenOffice Bugs/Feature Requests] WHERE Votes > 280;
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/buglist.cgi?f1=votes&o1=greaterthan&product=Writer&query_format=advanced&v1=280 [apache.org]
(Score: 1) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 26 2014, @04:25PM
Isn't the Open Office's "web layout" pretty much the same as Word's "normal view"? I've always used it as such without problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by emg on Tuesday August 26 2014, @05:03PM
Uh, yes. I just selected 'Web Layout' and, lo, it displays ' formatted text in a continuous flow (i.e. without upper and lower margins and headers/footers)'.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tniemi on Wednesday August 27 2014, @06:40PM
Um, guys...
First: The "web layout" is not a continuous flow, it is a big page that is approximately 2000 lines long. (Try it!) This has funny effects when editing...
Second: The text should not run all way to the edges of the screen. Optimal length seems to be somewhere in 60 characters:
http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability [baymard.com]
but this seems to be very personal.
This is actually what most authors want:
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom [hogbaysoftware.com]
If only that would came with editorial collaboration, versioning, tree style undo, etc. -- and if only publishers would use it as an industry standard!
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:24PM
And, besides, Word's collaborative mark-up implementation is shit.
Though this is from the perspective of a software engineer that uses git daily, so all in-document markup seems shit in comparison.
Is there a document-centric git mechanism out there? I know people had tried to use Subversion for this since it is built on top of webdav, and webdav was meant for this kind of thing... but I never saw an implementation I cared for.
Maybe my real problem is I just don't like to write documentation.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by gringer on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:07AM
I think that the point here is a good point. The people who use Microsoft® Word® are shooting his or her self in the food by being unconsciously limited by the grammar checker and by the spell checker. Should not it be the author of the book who decides the source format of the book?
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:06AM
his or her self in the food
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @09:20AM
If you find your self in the food, don't shoot it! :-)
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:34AM
Pretty sure you could submit in any format you want. But once you hand your document over to an editor its going to come back to you in the format they prefer. If you are lucky, you will be able to import it into your tool of choice and hopefully preserve the edits and mark up.
The golden rule of business is he who has the gold runs the business. If you are paying your editor out of pocket, then you can specify the tools. If you are relying on your publisher to supplying editing services, you will end up being pretty much at their mercy.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @02:58AM
This is not the case, at least with the major fiction publishers I've dealt with or heard from other authors about. They want Word documents. None that I'm aware of will accept anything else.
I haven't dealt with more than a small fraction of the smaller presses, but they wanted Word docs as well. I'm not sure if they required it or simply would prefer it.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:11AM
So it needs a working scroll bar, collaborative markup and something called "later stages". Now we can have a discussion about suitable alternatives.
Fuck it, let's just complain that there's such a thing as an industry standard and talk about how good LibreOffice is.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:35AM
Fuck it, let's call the writing of novels/stories/etc an industry, throw those whinging authors in cubicles and ask them a minimum of 17 pages/day (so we can publish a new novel every month).
(my point: why the hell would an author sacrifice her/his working style during the creation just for the sake of the publishing process? Does the publisher pay her/him more because s/he lowered the publishing process costs?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:39AM
Please mod parent up (insightful)! Industry standard should be key here.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:22AM
Last time I used MS Word for a longer text (at work) must have been around 10 years ago. I still remember the horrors in an environment with multiple colleagues having different office versions installed, the inability of MS Word to deal with this, our workaround (open document in StarOffice/later OpenOffice, save it again as an older MS Office version, load in older MS Office, fix layout), or when MS Word just wouldn't let me edit the text the way I want, how I created a new document, copied/pasted the old text without formatting, added the same formatting again in the new document manually, and out of the sudden I could do the changes MS Word denied me before...
At home/university I used LaTeX for longer texts already 15 years ago and still didn't see any more userfriendly/better alternative. For short texts (letters etc.) OpenOffice.org is completely sufficient, but for longer texts LaTeX is much more convenient. You have to think about the layout first, and it might take half an hour or one hour to get the skeleton right, but afterwards it's just focusing on the content and let LaTeX do the layout. Additional bonus:
- You can version your documents with git/mercurial/svn and see exactly, who changed what
- All content is basically plain-text, you can easily write a parser for other data sources and convert them to LaTeX content (I'm working in the area of SW release automation)
- No half-wit mouse-pusher will just take your document, create a redacted/"improved" version and send it around (unless you sent him an RTF version)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 5, Insightful) by cafebabe on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:02AM
We know that emailing BLOBs back and forth is stupid. We also know that re-inventing versioning inside a monolithic application is stupid. And we know that LaTeX and version control is the ultimate solution. Unfortunately, publishing houses aren't sufficiently competent to handle it. Not even with a graphical front-end for the version control. A more suitable option might be a wiki. This maintains versioning, removes most difficulty around markup and allows plot and character notes to be stored in a meaningful format.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:20AM
There are LaTeX tools to export to Open Document Format. Unfortunately (as far as I see it) there is no way to do the reverse efficiently. So, once the publisher get's his hands on the ODF version and starts his improvements, their modifications are lost for the LaTeX version.
Reg. Wiki: It does not have a central layout management, and I'm not sure there is a good e.g. wiki2pdf converter available. Wiki is sort of similar to HTML. (Ok, you can have stylesheets for web pages, but concepts like fixed page dimensions etc, left indent, right indent etc. might be difficult.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday August 26 2014, @11:34AM
"Unfortunately, publishing houses aren't sufficiently competent to handle it."
with the slight correction that pulp / mass market publishers can't handle it. Journal publishers, despite all their warts, pretty much only do *tex.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:52PM
LaTex is great for some purposes, and a pain in the ass for others. Sometimes it doesn't seem to know how to wrap a line of text. For other purposes it's ideal. But I don't typeset math formulae very often. For me a standard word processor is usually a better choice. Particularly as I don't want to invest a huge amount of time each time I want to use a new feature. And table of contents and index are MUCH easier in a decent word processor.
OTOH, I generally use LibreOffice. I haven't used MSWord since around 1998. So I can't speak to the current version. And I've never needed collaborative markup. But MSWord 5.1a for the Mac was, in my opinion, the best wordprocessor I've ever used. But do note the specific version and platform. MSWord for the PC was never even approximately as good, and even the Mac version went downhill from there. On the MSWind platform I never did find a word processor I'd call decent, though WordPerfect had it's points.
P.S.: The one defect of MSWord 5.1a for the Mac that I remember is that you could only have one index. I frequently need to have two or three, and occasionally more. (e.g., by date, by title, by first line) Nobody seems to handle that well. The last time I tried to use that feature in LibreOffice, I ran into so much trouble that I eventually gave up, and just jammed everything into the same index, with leading markers to show which index it should be in.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:16AM
The user-friendly front-end for Latex is Lyx.
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
I use it regularly.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:41AM
I tried it, I think, more than 15 years ago. Didn't really get along and switched to emacs/aspell/command line LaTeX. Probably it's much better now, but for me a wysiwyg editor contradicts the whole idea of LaTeX. (Also, at that time I had something similar to a Tidalwave PS 1000 [computinghistory.org.uk] as a toy. Not exactly this device, but a small 8086 compatible device with similar keyboard, small text editor and, iirc, two AA batteries to power it. I used it to practice assembler, and sometimes in the train to write texts to be copied to a "real" PC later.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Tuesday August 26 2014, @01:16PM
LyX is intended to be ``What You See is What You Mean'' --- it's actually quite nice and exports to LaTeX as cleanly as the author's discipline over unnecessary use of ``evil red text'' inserts of raw LaTeX code allows.
The books which I've done page composition on where the author used LyX have been on average much easier, cleaner and neater to handle than those of authors who've used LaTeX directly.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:27AM
out of the sudden
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091107094255AABtNUA [yahoo.com]
Latex is a type setting system, its hardly suitable for writing and collaboration.
Further, authors seldom get to typeset their own work. That is the work of the publishers. Any work approximating a finished document layout to submit to your publisher is wasted work.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:56AM
Thanks, I will try to remember it. Although I learned English mainly by reading, so the explanation in the link you sent does not work for me.
I agree it is - beside other things - a type setting system, I disagree heavily with your conclusion. LaTeX documents are usually subdivided, each chapter in it's own sub-folder or at least separate document, which makes it perfect for collaboration (in the sense that different people are working on different chapters; not necessarily for different people working on the same text segment, which is a nuisance in any system)
But at least technical writers can get to typeset their own formulas. And for novels etc. I'd expect the author still can decide, how the text is divided into chapters, where the text is divided in different paragraphs etc. The publisher can decide about the layout, i.e. how the paragraphs are visually marked, fonts, index/no index, layout for the table of contents, etc. And if the publisher knows what he's doing, this is much easier done when the text is already available in the right format for a type setting system.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tonyPick on Tuesday August 26 2014, @08:16AM
(in the sense that different people are working on different chapters; not necessarily for different people working on the same text segment, which is a nuisance in any system)
Except that Tex documents are plain text, the bulk of which is actually plain old text (i.e. absolutely minimal markup), which means that if you're in a technical context and dealing with people who understand basic tools then you can push them through any revision control system (git, svn, mercurial, whatever) and have the history, merge handling and change tracking, local deltas, etc. all plainly visible. This beats any of the "change notes that get dropped/who has the master document workflows" involved with word or libreoffice.
For that reason alone I haven't seen anything come even close to using Latex for collaborative document work in a technical environment, although that wouldn't necessarily apply in this (non-tech authors) case. Web based CMS tends to fall a bit short on the detailed tech doc front, but might be closest otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2014, @03:53PM
kEzfXU iozlmmpneihq [iozlmmpneihq.com], [url=http://lalngzugitbr.com/]lalngzugitbr[/url], [link=http://uqigqrrjrrry.com/]uqigqrrjrrry[/link], http://yithkdimwcvf.com/ [yithkdimwcvf.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:54AM
Oh noes, what did the publishers do (not so long ago) when the writer would send their machine-typed or - the horror of horrors - handwritten manuscript?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:58AM
I replied to basically the same argument in this thread, one post above. (Will not copy/paste to keep the discussion in one place.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 26 2014, @10:32AM
For example, a half-wit mouse-pusher can really fuck up both of them whilst attempting to redact or improve your original!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @07:38AM
Quite simply, if you don't like Word, don't use it. But what's that? You want to collaborate with others? Well now that sounds like a serious psychological problem, doesn't it. You need to reevaluate your horrendously inflated sense of your own importance that compels you to collaborate with people. Get help. Now.
(Score: 3) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 26 2014, @08:11AM
If you don't like it, don't use it? Ha! What about the minions of Micro$oft, who keep sending my documents in an evil and twisted file format? Should I not use them? No, this is a question about an illegal monopoly, found to be illegal by the United States Department of Justice, and not properly punished. It is evil, evil incarnate, it attempts to destroy any real standard for document file formats, and has largely succeeded. Serious psychological problem? I used WordStar!!! I used emacs!!! I used WordPerfect!!!!! And where are they now? Just because you are paranoid, that does not mean that Micro$oft is not out to destroy you. So get help, delusions like yours do not end well.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday August 26 2014, @11:09AM
Use mcedit [wikipedia.org] or similar text editor? Or just go with WordStar or WordPerfect?
Microsoft Word is a piece of shit and any user should know that. This is a problem that had a good solution before that crap, and there are still other solutions to this problem. Be it LyX, or any plain text editor [wikipedia.org].
Authors writes and delivers text to publisher. Then it's the publishers problem..
This such a non problem. Don't use shitty tools in a morass operating environment.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 26 2014, @12:02PM
You might think it works that way, but this describes no publisher, ever. Just try sending them the Great American Novel, handwritten. An author has to deliver his text to the publisher in a format that the publisher accepts. Most works go through several revisions, during which the editor/publisher will mark up the draft with suggestions or requirements for the author. The complaint that Stross and now Reynolds have is that the publishers require Word and won't consider manuscripts not in .doc/.docx format. No doubt, it makes life easier for the publisher and editor, but it seems to make life harder for the author.
You might also think it in the publisher's interest to make life easy for their best authors, but apparently best-selling authors are a cheaper commodity than editors.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 26 2014, @06:59PM
It's not that they're a cheaper commodity, though they may be. It's that the decision is made either by the editor or by someone else in the publishing house, And STANDARDS. (Standards really are important, but sometimes a really bad one can get chosen. Generally because it benefits the entity pushing it.)
P.S.: I consider *ALL* proprietary standards bad, but some only make things a bit more expensive, and others actively interfere with getting the job done. I have my opinion as to which this is, but it's not a well informed opinion...and neither is that of anyone here unless they are either an author, a publisher, or someone who has done a thorough study of the industry. That it's proprietary, however, there can be no doubt.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by dw861 on Wednesday August 27 2014, @02:22AM
Believe it or not, there is still a small band of WordPerfect for Linux adherents (frozen in time, such as it is).
http://www.xwp8users.com/ [xwp8users.com]
news://cnews.corel.com/corel.WordPerfect_Linux [corel.com]
But sadly I have to abandon xwp in favour of LibreOffice for all of my collaborative projects, for all of the reasons described above.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zafiro17 on Tuesday August 26 2014, @11:39AM
Publishing agencies no longer have time to think clearly as the whole industry is being overturned by the internet and ebooks and the like. If they did had the luxury of time and liberty to really think about how they do business, they'd find it's worse than they think.
In 2005 I worked for a publishing agency whose workflow involved some tasks in Word 2000 or 2002 or something, but then others in an old copy of Word 97 in which they had certain macros or something that no longer worked in newer versions. It was pathetic and it sounds like it was a royal pain in the ass for the editors pushing manuscripts from the beginning over the finish line.
I was lucky in that when I was writing for Avalon Travel Publishing, they permitted me to send text files instead of Word. This was their concession because they made me code all manuscripts in a unique markup language. But that allowed me to write a little syntax file and use the awesome Jedit to write my manuscripts ( http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/169-Editing-Avalon-Docs-in-Vim.html [therandymon.com] ), with syntax highlighting, keystroke macros, and the like. That made writing a piece of cake and let me focus on the manuscript, not the coding, and allowed me to stay free from MS Word too, which I despise.
Later, when I wrote the Dictator's Handbook ( http://dictatorshandbook.net/ [dictatorshandbook.net] ) I was on my own and was able to use the tools I like. I did it in emacs and LaTeX - the best writing experience I've ever had. I wrote a little thing here on the process: http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/151-Writing-a-Book-Using-Linux-Tools.html [therandymon.com]
PS - does anyone know why these three hyperlinks are being displayed differently? Is it a theme problem?
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by Open4D on Tuesday August 26 2014, @12:57PM
They all look the same to me.
(N.B. Normally when I utter that sentence I have to prefix it with "I'm not a racist but ..." !)
Anyway, I have no knowledge of themes, so I presume I'm on whatever theme comes as standard.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Tuesday August 26 2014, @01:15PM
Weird, for me the first two are black and the third one is green. I'm using the BadA55 theme (which looks really nice). It doesn't seem to be the difference between visited- and unvisited links, either.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by emg on Tuesday August 26 2014, @05:00PM
The weird part is that I just write in LibreOffice and run a script that automatically converts the file to an ebook for me, ready to upload to Amazon. Took about a day to write the script and get all the bugs out so it produced a nice-looking ebook, and now I can generate one formatted to my 'house style' in five seconds.
If legacy publishers had clue, they'd be doing something similar. But when the only tool you have is Microsoft Office, everything looks like a spreadsheet or Word macro.
(Score: 1) by fatuous looser on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:42PM
Never understand why folks speak of WordPerfect in the past tense. It is alive & thriving at corel.com, albeit with a (relatively) tiny user-base. With its strict WYSIWYG screen-view for every printer on the planet & the "reveal codes" tool, it is still kicking MS Word's ass all over the parking lot. (Am not an employee, just an enthusiast since 1987.)
Do you absolutely HAVE to make a Word doc? Make an RTF (a Microsoft-invented format). Problem solved.
(Score: 1) by dw861 on Wednesday August 27 2014, @11:28PM
Amen! Pls see my post above re WordPerfect for Linux under the thread title "Use plain text editor ..!?"
(Score: 1) by fatuous looser on Thursday August 28 2014, @06:53PM
Yeah, already read your post about Worp 8 for Linux. Was intrigued with that back when it was happening & didn't realize there were still adherents. I wish they would make it happen again with an update. Would make my inevitable migration away from Microsoft so much easier. Would happily pay the going rate for it. Worth every penny.
Another thing occurred to me. One theory of why Word is such a clunker blames the object-oriented programming approach. Object-oriented is great for many things but word processing is not one of them.