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from the how-do-I-convert-my-existing-files? dept.
Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word: Which works better for business?:
Have you been thinking of reassessing which word processor your business should standardize on? The obvious choices are the two best known: Microsoft Word and Google Docs. But which is better?
Several years ago, the answer to that would have been easy: Microsoft Word for its better editing, formatting and markup tools; Google Docs for its better collaboration. But both applications have been radically updated since then. Word now has live collaboration tools, and Google has added more sophisticated formatting, editing and markup features to Docs.
TFA requires free registration, but the question is an interesting one: Have Google Docs arrived at parity with, or surpassed, Microsoft Word for business needs? How much work is required to transition existing documents, macros, and workflows?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @09:42AM (4 children)
WYSIWYG editors suck. LaTeX sucks too. It ain't even markup, it's a fucking programming language. Literally.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 02 2020, @03:28PM (3 children)
I've long ago discovered that to be able to focus properly on writing I need a document compiler, not a word processor. And it needs to cooperate with distributed version control (which all "word processors" I've seen don't).
I still haven't found one I like.
Aside from some ancient ones running on mainframes in the 70's, and some homebrew that's a low-grade stopgap, I've looked at Scribble. Markdown, and, of course, Tex.
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TeX:
Even as a programming language, TeX wasn't designed with the knowledge that existed in the programming language community. No idea of scope rules. Everything is in one huge namespace, implemented by macro processing, and capable of redefining the syntax in obscure ways.
Once a few TeX "modules" have contributed their contents to the global namespace, you have no idea *what* your notations do.
Oh yes, these days TeX generates pdf files, and not much else.
At least TeX does do mathematics.
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Scribble:
Scribble *is* based on a decent programming language, Racket, which is a dialect of Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp. But it does not have Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses. It is, simply, a different syntax for Lisp that looks like plain readable text with mark-up. The markup is where the Lisp is hidden. Each straightforward markup command is actually syntactic sugar for a Lisp expression. The bulk of the built-in textual layout semantics is written in Racket, and merely called from the Scribble document.
And Scribble can produce output in either TeX or HTML. This is a decided plus.
In theory, if you want to do something that's different from built-in, you just have to write some Racket functions to do it. So it's quite extensible. Except that the Racket code for Scribble is huge, and hard to understand unless you're willing to exert a major effort to get into it. And there are a few standard document formats and unless you're happy with one of those, you're involved in rewriting parts of Scribble. In practice, this makes your novel look like a manual.
And Scribble doesn't have a notation for mathematics.
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Pollen:
There's a variation of Scribble called Pollen. It's main distinction is that it's like Scribble with most of its guts ripped out so you're in a do-it-yourself situation. You can generate any output file format you want, as long as you do it al yourself.
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Markdown:
And the there's Markdown. Easy to use, also deficient. It is poorly defined. It has multiple implementations that differ in the corner cases. It has multiple incompatible notations for tables. It lacks an "include" feature to allow you to split a large document into multiple files.
And it doesn't do mathematics.
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If anyone can tell me where I'm wrong, or what tool might actually meet my needs, I'd like to hear it. At present I'm using homebrew code that has too few features, translates into HTML, has trouble producing decent TeX, and completely fails in producing any well-known word-processor file format such as .fodt, otd, or Word.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @05:20PM
Org mode https://orgmode.org/features.html [orgmode.org] works for me as a simple plain textish format that exports well. I mostly export to HTML but it lists ODT as included and mentions there are other exporters available.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @08:14PM
Have you tried lout?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2020, @03:59AM
This page compared a number of markup systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_document-markup_languages [wikipedia.org]
More history,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language#Types_of_markup_language [wikipedia.org]
In the '80s and '90s I used various versions of Mark of the Unicorn products, first Mince (Mince is not complete emacs) and Scribble (CP/M 8080 version of Carnegie Mellon Scribe text formatter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language)#Related_software [wikipedia.org]
Later the two were combined into MotU FinalWordII (MS-Dos) which served well for a number of 100+ page structured user manuals, and also a 900 page book. This still runs in a DOS emulator and the pdf output is still perfect, the .ps files can be opened directly by SumatraPDF for viewing/printing.
FWII was also sold as Perfect Writer and later to Borland which became Sprint Wordprocessor. Amazingly enough there is still a Sprint mail list, I get a post every year or so these days...
Scribble/FWII formatter/Sprint all lacked multi-line formatting, thus no good equation editor (I faked it, but took a lot of manual spacing, not good enough for publication).
The full blown Scribe was expensive, but it did include an equation editor and much better image support than the Mark of the Unicorn microcomputer ports. I think the reason TeX won was that it was free (as in beer and as in freedom), the Scribe maintainers never offered a free version, so there was never a big user community like for TeX. But, for years major structured documents like Intel documentation were done in Scribe.