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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 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.