I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with.
I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.
I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features.
And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.
I'm an avid user of Pages because of its consistent UI. But it's still lacking a very important feature for the usecases you mentioned: cross referencing and bibliography.
As an aside: Did you know that you can create a halfway decent xhtml from Pages documents by exporting to epub and extracting the embedded documents? I've used that in the past to create a simple database my wife can edit using the tools she knows (Pages) by converting that stuff to an xml db. You can even script all the intermediate steps using AppleScript. As a platform to hack on, OSX can combine the strengths of Unix with the UI scriptability of Windows OLE.
> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents.
Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet.
I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here).
I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles.
The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well.
The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet!
So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around.
Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not?
I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time.
At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway.
The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take.
(disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)
This post begs the question - can Word be replaced with HTML/CSS? What if there were a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor? HTML would provide the intechangable document format; the ubiquity of browsers means everyone already has a document viewer; it would allow those with a desire for greater control to edit text directly in a text editor, separate from the presentation layer; and documents could be formatted for different presentation on screen and when printed; and while we're at it, we could replace powerpoint too.
I'm a LaTeX addict and not an HTML guru, so I'm sure there's a reason this solution doesnt work, but it seems intriguing.
I was merely commenting on the usability of "style sheets" in Word, not arguing that one thing should replace another. For instance, I can easily imagine that the run-of-the-mill "markup" WYSIWYG workflow in Word is an excellent fit for writing a short formal letter.
Although, a few years ago, a couple of friends of mine were working on their masters theses in non-computer related fields (literature and biology), they complained about Word and its tendency to get somewhat "wonky" when working with very large documents (I am glad I have never had to experience such a task). I talked to them about the basic ideas behind the LaTeX workflow, that writing the text and doing layout/styling are straight from the start intended to be two separate concepts--you're either working on one or the other. And how the text content is also just that: a plain text file with a few document structure-related codes in it. A plain text file doesn't lose whole sections or mangles up chapters for no apparent reason.
I was surprised to hear their reaction, they were very intrigued and would have been readily prepared to learn the basics of LaTeX, if it meant getting that peace-of-mind: that writing a large chunk of text means that it is there, without a program doing behind-the-scenes modifications on it if you decide to move parts around, or so. I say "would have been" because they were already quite far in their theses so it would've made little sense to make the switch still.
Because that's really the point, isn't it? That's what annoys me about Word (and a lot of other word processing software btw), it just won't keep its fingers off my document, and all sorts of things happen under-the-hood. With LaTeX (and similar solutions, perhaps Markdown) the whole workflow is different: first you write the content, with some minimal markup and structuring codes, and that's a text file. It's yours and nobody, no software is going to touch it. It's source code. And only then you apply a program to it, in order to compile it to a display format. But that program will not touch your source.
I really like it that way. I understand it's not for everyone on the consumer market, but it's interesting to consider how different that paradigm is.
I don't think replacing Word documents with HTML/CSS is viable, since they specify content for two different formats. HTML is suited to flowing content like a river, whereas Word is for documents meant to fit on a printed page, like on a stone tablet.
You'd have to create quite complicated style templates to get HTML formatted to fit onto pages.
+1 for Pages. I once sent a .pages document to a friend on Linux. I was genuinely surprised when he could read it. Turns out .pages is actually a zip file, that when extracted, has a PDF inside.
Pages has always scaled fine for me, however Numbers will choke on a gigabyte-sized CSV. I tried to, import the US census data into it. I couldn't get Numbers to work. It crashed every time. Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
> Microsoft Excel could just about cope but was struggling to scroll or filter data. Eventually I gave up and threw it into MySQL. The right tool for the job.
Although Excel has since been corrected for this use case[1], it isn't even the right Office tool for the job. That's what they created Access for.
[1]The SQL Server team built PowerPivot for Excel 2010+, which basically imports your data into a SQL db that gets embedded into the Excel file and transparently queried from Excel proper. Runs smooth as butter, and pacifies the Excel purists who refuse to lower themselves into using Access (I've worked with several of said purists).
You're correct, and Excel for Mac also doesn't support the PowerPivot addon either. However, that still doesn't mean you can fault Excel for barely being able to cope with a use case it isn't designed to support. The fact that it can handle it at all is a testament to the versatility of the program, not the other way around. It simply isn't the correct tool for the job, and shouldn't be faulted for subpar performance in a scenario it wasn't designed for.
Writing code in Word is completely possible, but would you fault Microsoft for the ensuing bad experience? You can also use Eclipse for writing a resumé, but would you fault it for not supporting that use case very well?
I always understood it to be a feature of Excel that it couldn't cope with larger datasets.
It means you are forced to consider buying an expense Enterprise SQL license once you are using it in earnest. If it wasn't for Excel chocking on 5million rows I'm convinced most businesses wouldn't bother with databases at all.
>> "Most businesses wouldn't bother having a cafeteria if only Excel could cook meals."
This part is tongue in cheek, but true. There are businesses out there, where excel is used for everything, including many things it should never be used for. Seriously powerful app. Seriously (ab)used.
I don't hate Excel, but I hate the "craplications" hare-brained power users create.
16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once.
I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.
I've had a similar experience with editors, good old vim and less works but most other editors will crash or become unusable as log sizes increase.
Of cause, for parsing logs a few well thought out awk commands combined with sed, sort, unique and other *nix utilities usually beats everything else in my experience.
So if I use LaTeX and it gives me the results I want and I don't find myself spending inordinate amounts of time tweaking things, does that make me an intermediate user? I guess I had better stop learning.
I think you hit a local extremum, so yes, I'd advise you to stay there :-)
The day will come when you will need those two figures side-by-side, together with a caption positioned just right. Or a table that spans multiple pages and has multi-column cells. Or, heaven forbid, you will need to submit your bibliography in a byzantine format invented by someone with nothing better to do ("we take pride in the fact that we place a period after author's names").
LaTeX also has another problem: even if you know it, getting from a document.tex file with 0 bytes to a document that looks good takes much longer than it should. By "looks good" I mean doesn't use Computer Modern, and overall doesn't look like a thesis from the 70s.
If you don't like Computer Modern it's only a \fontstyle{times} change away. It's humerus that you claim Latex doesn't look good as it's beautiful output is the reason many people put up with it's warts.
> The day will come when you will need those two figures side-by-side, together with a caption positioned just right. Or a table that spans multiple pages and has multi-column cells.
Not sure if you mean to say it is difficult to do or not in LaTeX.. but I had to do just that last week (10+ pages long tables, side by side figures with fancy captions, etc.).. and it was just a matter of searching for "LaTeX $problem" and I was in business..
This just goes to show you the shabby general state of word processing software. I've been looking for something better than OO/Libre/MSWord/etc for years and avoided using LaTeX because the workflow is _so_ 80's. However, having recently decided to give up, and switched to using LaTeX, my worksheets, course notes, exams, and presentations have never looked better, and take about the same time, or less to create. I'll also be able to do things like randomize the order of exam questions and create individual grading keys in a way that makes sense to me.
To be fair, I would advise almost no one to do the same. Something better is needed[1], but I think that most potential competitors know better than to attempt to challenge MS Word.
[1] And, indeed Google Docs is usually passable and offers some advantages.
It makes perfectly nice looking circuits, so it passes a definition of "works" but it is an archaic way of describing circuits. if I had to do serious electronics work in that manner, I might not bother. Yes, I can include drawings created by other software, and do so for more complex circuits.
I can understand that as a reason. In this case it sounds like there is a newer, more efficient format that has superseded the old one. (I'm no expert in circuits, so I'll take your word for it.)
If some new technique/workflow/whatever is newer and more efficient, then I'm all for it. I just don't like the attitude that "newer == better" that has seemed to become more and more prevalent in recent years. (I'm not saying you were doing that, but the phrasing you used is something I typically see in that situation.)
I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my experience.
The point where something is unfixable in LaTeX is much more complex than the point something is unfixable in Word, where I seem to jump down the rabbit hole on relatively simple documents.
That is a matter of opinion. I think the lack of source code is a problem of incredible complexity, in that overcoming that hurdle would require one to somehow force MS to fix something.
I think LaTeX starts marginally easy, gets complex and fiddly but then pretty much just stays at the same level of complex and fiddly. Word starts very easy, gets complicated quickly and eventually presents un-fixable problems, no matter what your skill level.
That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text editor works as well.
Me too. I'm currently using it for the second time for a large multilingual dictionary. Both dictionaries are the first produced for these languages. People are thrilled at the results. It is so easy to create something beautiful with LaTeX.
I think LaTeX simply doesn't live up to its promise. Yes, its a big improvement over Word, but I still find myself manually adding \newpages, rewriting paragraphs and shuffling text around because figures are placed in completely awkward places or you have pages with just one line of text and a sea of white.
That is in addition to the horrors you unleash once something stops working and you need to dig deeper. dvi2pdf..
There are about 5 parameters that adjust latex's pickiness when doing page layout with figures. Things like proportion of the page taken up by a figure. Tweak these and these problems should mostly go away. You may still need to move a figure ahead of a block of ordinary text (only do it at the final edit!) but you won't be tearing your hair out.
Over the last couple of years I have migrated my workflow away from MS Office products (Word/Excel/VBA/PowerPoint) to LaTeX, R, Sweave/knitr.
These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am a strong believer in literate programming - embedding the code in the documentation where feasible. There are case where it is not (long Monte Carlo simulations) but I can at least pull in the results and have the source code that generated them in version control and the report automatically uses the latest version.
Microsoft kept changing VBA and each release would break things. We had third party tools that had locked VBA modules and ours just wouldn't permit processing data in these workbooks.
I can extract all the data with R and am much happier. The Open Source community seems to better support their products than Microsoft. Go figure...
I came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things.
So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).
I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.
I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features.
And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.