What's another word for failure?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    A little over a year ago, I got a new laptop. Win7, standard bloatware shit to uninstall. After that was done, I needed to put on a word processor. Couldn't find my Office disks, and even so, wife couldn't whatever eLearning school access activation keys she has access to.  Fine, whatever-- I've always meant to try OpenOffice.org.

    At first the UI didn't feel right, which I chalked up to just being a new UI. Slightly different scroll speed, minor layout difference. It's just a word processor after all. Fundamentally they're all the same.

    SO I PUT UP WITH IT.

    Then the interesting glitches came along. Saving as .docx usually didn't work quiet right-- enough that there were random problems opening such files on other copies of Word or trying to import to Google Docs. Fine, just be sure to save as .doc (2003). Annoying, but solvable. Or at least work-around-able.

    SO I STILL PUT UP WITH IT.

    Then there were the more annoying UI glitches. Random tool tips that pop up while I'm scrolling. Annoying when I'm in the flow of things. You can disable them, but it also takes out useful tooltips-- like wtf each button does. And you need to know that, since the icons are weird, and you can't quite customize all the toolbars. Or the seemingly random indentation because of some "smart" feature or other.

    I CAN IGNORE AND MOSTLY PUT UP WITH IT.

    And then came the usability issues-- things that seem small but man are they ever fucking annoying and only go to highlight the praise that should be heaped upon the Office team. Mainly due to shit like bulleted lists. In Word, easy-- just start typing a list. It'll pick it up and create it for you. Tab and shift tab increase and decrease the indent level of the list. In general, hitting enter twice at the end breaks the list. Going to the end of a list, backspace once then enter continues the list again.  Pretty much NONE of that shit works in OO.org. Trying to make a numbered list is an exercise in frustration. More than once, I've had to delete a list and start again just to make the formatting work. And dumb shit like that extends to other formatting beyond the list. Headers, how the fuck do they work?  OMG OO.o can't figure out I've stopped using that font on the paragraph. ARG!  Lots of "copy into Notepad to clear formatting, paste back, redo".

    BUT I AM DETERMINED TO GIVE THIS HUNK OF PENIS SHIT THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

    And then-- {shudder} jesus fucking Christ, this.  So I'm writing my Featured Article, [url=http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Call-of-WTF.aspx]The Call of WTF[/url]-- the Halloween special, "inspired" by Lovecraft and his writing style. If you aren't familiar with his style, it's VERY purple, very heavy, and Lovecraft was basically in sexual love with his thesaurus. He'd almost never use the same description twice, even in the same paragraph.  To help mimic that, I figure I'd use the handy-dandy built in thesaurus that every word processor has. The first half of the article I wrote on my lunch at work, and my work machine has Word. I would write a spooky description, then just right click on Spooky, pick the thesaurus flyout menu, and pick Creepy instead. Fucking awesome.

    I get home to write the second half, write a Mysterious description, right click on Mysterious and-- hmm. Weird. No thesaurus.  That can't be right. This is the latest version of OO. It was released in 2013. Everything has a thesaurus these days.  So let's ask the motherfucking Internet-- "OpenOffice right click thesaurus".

    And Jesus fucking Mary in her incest hole-- though it has a thesaurus, OO does not have a right click option to access it. You get "helpful" suggestions like "click here, here then here, open the Thesaurus, type in the word you want, and when you find it, type that word into your manuscript".  This is presented in every help thread as if it is an acceptable solution. Even threads titled "I fucking know OO has a thesaurus but it's goddamn retarded to go into submenus and type in words to use it. How the fuck do I just right click on a word like I've been able to do in Word for over a motherfucking decade?!?".

    The best and only solution anyone can give is "There's a feature request for customizable context menus, wait for that to be completed."

    That feature has been in "requested" mode since [url=https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=7449]September 2002[/url]. ELEVEN YEARS and they can't figure out how to put Thesaurus into the right click context menu. No fucking wonder this pile of monkey shit made of shit that another monkey at directly from the anus of a third monkey has never taken off. No wonder their adaption rate is abysmal. I know a lot of writers, and not a single goddamn one of them would use a word processor with a effectively non-existant thesaurus feature.

    So in summary, fuck this. I gave it a fair shot. I'm switching back to Word.



  • All the cool kids use LibreOffice instead



  • Seriously? I don't think I've used a built-in thesaurus ever.

    But yes, OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) is horrible. I'd rather use Office 2003. The other day I was trying to turn an image 90º in (a possibly old version of) OpenOffice Writer. That's one of the most basic things a word processor can do right? But I couldn't find an option to do it, so I googled it and turns out "you have to export the image to OpenOffice Draw, rotate it and then import it back again to Writer". What the fuck.

    I almost posted it here but turns out it's fixed in the latest version of LibreOffice and that kinda ruined it.



  • For $100/year you can get the latest Office version that you can install on 5 machines (PC or Mac, with an easy revoke option on office.com if you need to swap a machine). You also get 20 extra GB on Skydrive and 60 minutes of Skype per month. Also comes with Office On Demand, which is basically a throw-away stream version for the times where you are not using your own computer and need access to Office.

    Unless you have AIDS or visible genetic defects you can probably get more than that by jerking off once or twice at the sperm bank. I know they have outdated porn mags but that's still a more pleasant experience than using OpenOffice or LibreOffice for a year.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @anonymous234 said:

    Seriously? I don't think I've used a built-in thesaurus ever.
    I have. IMPASSE!

    @anonymous234 said:

    But yes, OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) is horrible. I'd rather use Office 2003. The other day I was trying to turn an image 90º in (a possibly old version of) OpenOffice Writer. That's one of the most basic things a word processor can do right? But I couldn't find an option to do it, so I googled it and turns out "you have to export the image to OpenOffice Draw, rotate it and then import it back again to Writer". What the fuck.

     ... fuck.

    For the record, I originally picked OpenOffice over LibreOffice for "reasons I'd researched". It'd take me longer to remember them than to just install Office.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Ronald said:

    For $100/year
     

    And you lost me. Why the fuck should I pay every year for a fucking word processor? Especially if there's even a remote chance my writing will suddenly vanish into the cloud or get locked up behind a paywall?

    Fuck that. I'll gladly pay for a discounted copy of Office 2007, but paying each year for a word processor? No.



  • The best and only solution anyone can give is "There's a feature request for customizable context menus, wait for that to be completed."

    That feature has been in "requested" mode since September 2002. ELEVEN YEARS and they can't figure out how to put Thesaurus into the right click context menu.

    Why don't you fork it, then?... okay, just kidding.

    But really, in 2012 you didn't know that OO.o is a gastrointestinal byproduct of a Monkey Centipede? Must have been a pretty comfy rock you've been living under.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @Ronald said:

    For $100/year
     

    And you lost me. Why the fuck should I pay every year for a fucking word processor? Especially if there's even a remote chance my writing will suddenly vanish into the cloud or get locked up behind a paywall?

    Fuck that. I'll gladly pay for a discounted copy of Office 2007, but paying each year for a word processor? No.

    Why would your "writing suddenly vanish"? There is no difference between a retail DVD or an office.com version of Office, except that you need to renew the office.com subscription every year (and you are fucked if you lose the DVD). This works just like MSDN. If you choose to store documents in your Skydrive folder they will be replicated on Microsoft's servers and on any devices where you connect that drive, but they don't disappear, it's a local folder*.

    The retail version of Office is around $400. And you can install it on ONE machine. With the $100/year deal you can run it on FIVE machines, plus you get some perks (more Skydrive space, etc). I fail to see a situation where buying the $400 copy makes sense, but if that's the price you are ready to pay so you can feel like you "own" Excel, go for it.

    * with SkyDrive Pro business users can use placeholder files to avoid replicating the entire drive on every machine but that's a different product.



  • @Ronald said:

    except that you need to renew the office.com subscription every year
    Problem #1 - You stop paying,the program stops working. I don't have that problem with Office 2003 which still works just fine and still does exactly what I need. @Ronald said:
    (and you are fucked if you lose the DVD)
    Anyone with half a brain makes backup copies. @Ronald said:
    I fail to see a situation where buying the $400 copy makes sense
    If Microsoft's current pricing scam scheme had been in place when I bought Office 2003, I would have paid $1000 by now. And forced to upgrade to newer shittier versions with a fucked up, user-hostile UI. Since the spreadsheet and word processing functions that most people do today are no different that they were in 2003 (or 1993) I fail to see how paying $1000 (and increasing every year) is a better deal than $400.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    If Microsoft's current pricing scam scheme had been in place when I bought Office 2003, I would have paid $1000 by now. And forced to upgrade to newer shittier versions with a fucked up, user-hostile UI. Since the spreadsheet and word processing functions that most people do today are no different that they were in 2003 (or 1993) I fail to see how paying $1000 (and increasing every year) is a better deal than $400.

    Those pesky kids with their new-fangled interfaces and pricing schemes. It's a good thing that Wordstar still works as it should.



  •  You know that I could write most of that rant but substitue Word for OpenOffice?  Like how Word likes to totally fk up lists if you try anything other then a simple bullet list?  Or that stupid auto-formatter that wants to rape your carefully formatted paragraph and turn it into a abortion of Lovecroftian proportions.  Or how opening a Word document in any other version of Office will subtley mess up any formatting.

     In all honesty, they are all frustrating to use if you are not following their use cases.  I personally use Libreoffice because it is free.  It may have its own stupid quirks but at least I am not paying any cash for the privilage of using it...



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    No fucking wonder this pile of monkey shit made of shit that another monkey at directly from the anus of a third monkey has never taken off.
    Seriously, dude, get yourself some St John's wort before you blow out an artery.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    If Microsoft's current pricing scam scheme had been in place when I bought Office 2003, I would have paid $1000 by now. And forced to upgrade to newer shittier versions with a fucked up, user-hostile UI. Since the spreadsheet and word processing functions that most people do today are no different that they were in 2003 (or 1993) I fail to see how paying $1000 (and increasing every year) is a better deal than $400.

    Those pesky kids with their new-fangled interfaces and pricing schemes. It's a good thing that Wordstar still works as it should.

    Wordstar? That's bleeding edge. My IBM Selectric does the job pretty well. Since the number of letters that people can type today is no different that it was in 1961, I fail to see how paying money for "software" is a good deal at all.



  • @Emu said:

    I personally use Libreoffice because it is free.


    "I approve of that".
    -Ebenezer Scrooge



  • @Ronald said:

    @Emu said:

    I personally use Libreoffice because it is free.


    "I approve of that".
    -Ebenezer Scrooge

    I use LibreOffice because it's free, too. And it's not because I'm cheap. You see, none of my hobbies involve using a word processor. You know what I use a word processor for? For formatting set lists for my band. That's it. Now, we do about three shows a year, and I'm not shelling out at least a hundred bucks for three fucking set lists. If like Lorne my hobbies involved writing, then I'd be tempted to buy a decent word processor. Hobbies cost money, which is fine, and Office is worth the cash if you use it. But since I don't (at least not at home), it's not for me. I'd rather spend my money on strings and effects pedals and stuff.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    ... Mainly due to shit like bulleted lists. In Word, easy-- just start typing a list. It'll pick it up and create it for you. Tab and shift tab increase and decrease the indent level of the list. In general, hitting enter twice at the end breaks the list. Going to the end of a list, backspace once then enter continues the list again.  Pretty much NONE of that shit works in OO.org. Trying to make a numbered list is an exercise in frustration. More than once, I've had to delete a list and start again just to make the formatting work. And dumb shit like that extends to other formatting beyond the list. Headers, how the fuck do they work?  OMG OO.o can't figure out I've stopped using that font on the paragraph. ARG!  Lots of "copy into Notepad to clear formatting, paste back, redo"...

    Sounds like Google's wiki editors. Seriously, fuck Google.

    @El_Heffe said:

    If Microsoft's current pricing scam scheme had been in place when I bought Office 2003, I would have paid $1000 by now. And forced to upgrade to newer shittier versions with a fucked up, user-hostile UI. Since the spreadsheet and word processing functions that most people do today are no different that they were in 2003 (or 1993) I fail to see how paying $1000 (and increasing every year) is a better deal than $400.

    Welcome to Software as a Service, also known as legal extortion. Soon everything will be in "the cloud", so get used to this business model.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    The other day I was trying to turn an image 90º in (a possibly old version of) OpenOffice Writer. That's one of the most basic things a word processor can do right?

    Um … no? The most basic thing a word processor does, is enable you to write text in a convenient manner and — if/when you want to — print out that text. Just about everything related to formatting that text, never mind graphics, is encroaching into what is properly DTP software territory.



  • @Gurth said:

    @anonymous234 said:
    The other day I was trying to turn an image 90º in (a possibly old version of) OpenOffice Writer. That's one of the most basic things a word processor can do right?
    Um … no? The most basic thing a word processor does, is enable you to write text in a convenient manner and — if/when you want to — print out that text. Just about everything related to formatting that text, never mind graphics, is encroaching into what is properly DTP software territory.
     

    You must be one of those people that insist that calling them "bytes" is wrong because it could mean any amount of bits and we should use "octets" instead.



  • @Ronald said:

    Wordstar? That's bleeding edge. My IBM Selectric does the job pretty well. Since the number of letters that people can type today is no different that it was in 1961, I fail to see how paying money for "software" is a good deal at all.

    Oh, you kids and your new-fangled toys...

    Old School...



  • @Ronald said:


    The retail version of Office is around $400. And you can install it on ONE machine.

     

    That's because MS removed the more sane options like the family and student editions which contained Word, Excel and Power point for like $100 for usage on 3 computers for unlimited time period.

    Yeah, the online one contains Access but who really cares? Who cares about skype minutes? I already can call for free on land lines so forth. The annoying thing is MS clearly removed the cheapest most obvious options for like 95% of users by replacing it with a way, way more expensive subscription based solution.

     



  • Frankly I love the new Office, including the new pricing model. I have it installed on all my machines, use it pretty regularly, and I'd have to pay the full retail price of $100 a year for 20 years to zero that out.


    Not to mention, only suckers pay full price for MS yearly subs. I pick up the cards on Amazon for $50 or $60 from the bulk resellers.



  • @Ronald said:

    @Maciejasjmj said:
    @El_Heffe said:
    If Microsoft's current pricing scam scheme had been in place when I bought Office 2003, I would have paid $1000 by now. And forced to upgrade to newer shittier versions with a fucked up, user-hostile UI. Since the spreadsheet and word processing functions that most people do today are no different that they were in 2003 (or 1993) I fail to see how paying $1000 (and increasing every year) is a better deal than $400.

    Those pesky kids with their new-fangled interfaces and pricing schemes. It's a good thing that Wordstar still works as it should.

    Wordstar? That's bleeding edge. My IBM Selectric does the job pretty well. Since the number of letters that people can type today is no different that it was in 1961, I fail to see how paying money for "software" is a good deal at all.

    Oh please, þat piece of shit can't even type þ.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Those pesky kids with their new-fangled interfaces and pricing schemes. It's a good thing that Wordstar still works as it should.
     

    Funnily enough, there is a strong contingent of pro writers who still use Wordstar. [url=http://sfwriter.com/2008/12/25-years-of-using-wordstar-canadian-sf.html]Robert J. Sawyer[/url], for example. Simple enough reasoning: they started on Wordstar, are ultra productive in it. They are still ultra productive in it, and there's little to no benefit to switching to another processor. Especially if you balance the amount of time they'd spend on the learning curve vs. time gained.

    [url=http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm]Wordstar: A Writer's Word Processor[/ur]

    I personally have never tried it, because I'm fast enough in Word.  I did start on Word Perfect 5.1, and got very good at that. But the benefit of using Word and having things like on screen menus far outweighed any nostalgic benefit WP51 might have had. =)



  • In other words.

    "Boohoo, OpenOffice isn't exactly like MS Office!!!!"

     @Lorne Kates said:

    Mainly due to shit like bulleted lists. In Word, easy

    Really? Lists?!? Are you trying to arguee that Word  handles lists better than Write? Lists are the one single nightmare of anybody that uses Word, it simply can't handle anything that isn't a sequence of single liners without any fancy formatting (and don't ever try nesting).

    Anyway, I'll repeat that all the cool guys are using LibreOffice. And the uncool ones that want to get shit done... Well, as a general rule, using an office package is incompatible with getting shit done (unless you are only using a spreadsheet - spreadsheets are good).


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Mcoder said:

    In other words.

    "Boohoo, OpenOffice isn't exactly like MS Office!!!!"

    CHOKE ON MY TEARS!

    @Mcoder said:

    Anyway, I'll repeat that all the cool guys are using LibreOffice

    I might try LibreOffice. I was just about to upgrade OpenOffice to the latest version hoping it would fix things. I went to read the release notes, and the #1 new features is a "brand new innovative UI and UX experience that revolutionized everything" (paraphrase). A sidebar. A fucking Ribbon on it's side.

    When there's decade-plus usability bugs that have not been addressed, and the team is spending it's limited resources on taking a failed UI concept and failing harder at it-- it's time for me to jump ship.

    Oh, and LibreOffice 4.1 uses the Sidebar to. Forget it. Back to Word. If I'm going to suffer through a Ribbon interface, I might as well use the devil I know.

    Literally nothing good ever came from something named "Sidebar".

     

     



  • "Oh please, þat piece of shit can't even type þ"

    I þink it's spelled ðat. Slightly different sound (þick, þin, ðese, ðose).

     

    (edited for consistency)


  • Considered Harmful

    @silverpie said:

    Slightly different sound (þick, þin, ðese, ðose).



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    the Halloween special, "inspired" by Lovecraft and his writing style. If you aren't familiar with his style, it's VERY purple, very heavy, and Lovecraft was basically in sexual love with his thesaurus.

    Never ascribe to sexual love that which is adequately explained by magazines paying by the word for stories.


    Dickens had the same problem.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Literally nothing good ever came from something named "Sidebar".

    I see what you did there, and posit Blakeyrat's epic rage-quit as counter-evidence.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @silverpie said:
    Slightly different sound (þick, þin, ðese, ðose).
     

    *everyþing



  • I write all documents in a text editor, using Markdown when fancy styling is required. Haven't worried about formatting or how stylish my documents are for years. Sounds like you would benefit from doing something similar. All word processing applications are garbage, especially OO and Libreoffice.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    You must be one of those people that insist that calling them "bytes" is wrong because it could mean any amount of bits and we should use "octets" instead.

    I have no problem at all with "byte" meaning "eight bits". All I'm saying is that your example of basic things a word processor should do, is of something word processors didn't do originally and which was only added when people (including me, I freely admit) started using them as makeshift DTP programs. Still doesn't mean manipulating images is basic functionality of a word processor.



  • @Gurth said:

    @anonymous234 said:
    You must be one of those people that insist that calling them "bytes" is wrong because it could mean any amount of bits and we should use "octets" instead.

    I have no problem at all with "byte" meaning "eight bits". All I'm saying is that your example of basic things a word processor should do, is of something word processors didn't do originally and which was only added when people (including me, I freely admit) started using them as makeshift DTP programs. Still doesn't mean manipulating images is basic functionality of a word processor.

    Basic functionality of a word processor is processing words. As in, you input words, and it performs some process on them. That might be sending the words to the printer. That might be saving the words to the filesystem. It might even be computing the MD5 hashsum of each word and xoring them all together.

    My word processor processes words by discarding them and making beeping noises at arbitrary intervals.



  • @aapis said:

    I write all documents in a text editor, using Markdown when fancy styling is required. Haven't worried about formatting or how stylish my documents are for years.

    Markdown is for sissies. I use Textile.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Lorne Kates said:

    SO I PUT UP WITH IT.

    Soon-to-be-dead CDN hotlink



  • @Mcoder said:

    using an office package is incompatible with getting shit done (unless you are only using Excel - Excels are good).
     

    ETFY



  •  Honestly, I've never had a problem with OpenOffice or LibreOffice. It's a word processor. I type in words and they show up. That's all I need it to do.

    The only reason I bothered paying $15 for the student version of Office 2010 is that OpenOffice didn't support Century Schoolbook. And I took a couple classes that would actually, not kidding at all, have failed me for using the wrong font.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Snooder said:

    The only reason I bothered paying $15 for the student version of Office 2010 is that OpenOffice didn't support Century Schoolbook. And I took a couple classes that would actually, not kidding at all, have failed me for using the wrong font.

    It's hard to argue with paying $15 for something like that, but can you explain how a word processor doesn't "support" a font? As a starving student, I think I might be motivated to convert that Office purchase into beer by downloading or otherwise getting the font from someone else if the font was the real reason for shelling out the money.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    SO I PUT UP WITH IT.

    Hi Lorne. This morning I posted a glowing praise of your work on the Halloween entry -- beautiful stuff. NOT AT ALL LIKE THIS POST. Way to take yourself down a couple of notches. First, open office is not meant to be a word clone, so get over it. Second, if you don't see a feature you like, you can write it yourself. It's open source, after all. Third, why do you feel you need to swear at people who are giving you their software for free. If it doesn't meet your needs, you're free to use some other software. So get over it.


    And I'll just take back my opinion, not about your article, but about yourself. You can be polite to people, help them out, and maybe even donate some money to get the features you want. Verbally raping them is not going to win you that right-click theosaurus.


  • Considered Harmful

    @DrPepper said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    SO I PUT UP WITH IT.

    Hi Lorne. This morning I posted a glowing praise of your work on the Halloween entry -- beautiful stuff. NOT AT ALL LIKE THIS POST. Way to take yourself down a couple of notches. First, open office is not meant to be a word clone, so get over it. Second, if you don't see a feature you like, you can write it yourself. It's open source, after all. Third, why do you feel you need to swear at people who are giving you their software for free. If it doesn't meet your needs, you're free to use some other software. So get over it.


    And I'll just take back my opinion, not about your article, but about yourself. You can be polite to people, help them out, and maybe even donate some money to get the features you want. Verbally raping them is not going to win you that right-click theosaurus.


    Don't you see? He's the blakeyrat of our time.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Those pesky kids with their new-fangled interfaces and pricing schemes. It's a good thing that Wordstar still works as it should.
     

    Funnily enough, there is a strong contingent of pro writers who still use Wordstar. Robert J. Sawyer, for example. Simple enough reasoning: they started on Wordstar, are ultra productive in it. They are still ultra productive in it, and there's little to no benefit to switching to another processor. Especially if you balance the amount of time they'd spend on the learning curve vs. time gained.

    [url=http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm]Wordstar: A Writer's Word Processor[/ur]

    I personally have never tried it, because I'm fast enough in Word.  I did start on Word Perfect 5.1, and got very good at that. But the benefit of using Word and having things like on screen menus far outweighed any nostalgic benefit WP51 might have had. =)

    Honestly, I could use Wordstar. In several years of using LyX*, the emacsy style of executing commands has grown up on me. Still, as good as it is for actually writing text, it seems to be lacking a lot of features when it comes to formating text. Edlin, on the other hand, is shit.

    Um … no? The most basic thing a word processor does, is enable you to write text in a convenient manner and — if/when you want to — print out that text. Just about everything related to formatting that text, never mind graphics, is encroaching into what is properly DTP software territory.

    That would be text editor, and in that manner, emacs or vi is far superior to both Word and OO.o's Write.

    However, by your logic, every kid who needs to as much as print out an essay title in a different font should get him/herself a DTP suite. What.

    Hi Lorne. This morning I posted a glowing praise of your work on the Halloween entry -- beautiful stuff. NOT AT ALL LIKE THIS POST. Way to take yourself down a couple of notches. First, open office is not meant to be a word clone, so get over it. Second, if you don't see a feature you like, you can write it yourself. It's open source, after all. Third, why do you feel you need to swear at people who are giving you their software for free. If it doesn't meet your needs, you're free to use some other software. So get over it.

    And I'll just take back my opinion, not about your article, but about yourself. You can be polite to people, help them out, and maybe even donate some money to get the features you want. Verbally raping them is not going to win you that right-click theosaurus.

    Hi DrPepper. First of all, you're wrong - OpenOffice's Write is very much a Word clone, just like OO.o is an Office clone. Denial is delusion.

    Second of all, the "write it yourself" philosophy is pretty much what ruins the open-source movement for me. In a sane development model, there are programmers and users, and programmers write stuff for users to use. If we force people into rolling their own stuff, the whole development becomes a circlejerk in which nobody cares about people who are supposed to actually use the software.

    The "it's free, so shut up" philosophy is also stupid, especially if two sentences later you encourage Lorne to donate his money to get the feature. If I were supposed to pay for my features, I might as well get myself a better, paid suite. And even if I were not to pay with actual money, I still lose time by putting up with crappy UIs, hidden features and outright insanity. And time isn't free either.

    Third of all:

    @DrPepper said:

    theosaurus.

    Oh, you kids and your new-fangled toys...

    Old School...

    Oh, you kids and all that "mobile" fad. Few years in, and you'll be back to writing on cave walls like we've always did.

    *Shut up, I like LyX. Mostly because I've never been bothered to learn TeX/LaTeX properly.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Snooder said:
    The only reason I bothered paying $15 for the student version of Office 2010 is that OpenOffice didn't support Century Schoolbook. And I took a couple classes that would actually, not kidding at all, have failed me for using the wrong font.

    It's hard to argue with paying $15 for something like that, but can you explain how a word processor doesn't "support" a font? As a starving student, I think I might be motivated to convert that Office purchase into beer by downloading or otherwise getting the font from someone else if the font was the real reason for shelling out the money.



    It's been a few years, but if I remember correctly, the problem was that Century Schoolbook is a proprietary Microsoft font. There are replacements that look pretty similar, but when you are dealing with the sort of people who will get out a ruler to measure your margins and know to a mica the difference between an en-dash and an em-dash, it's better to just use the font they tell you to use.

    Plus, if I spent more than a couple hours trying to download and install the font, that's already gone far over the limit of what time is worth for $15.



  • @DrPepper said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    SO I PUT UP WITH IT.

    Hi Lorne. This morning I posted a glowing praise of your work on the Halloween entry -- beautiful stuff. NOT AT ALL LIKE THIS POST. Way to take yourself down a couple of notches.

    Tough love time. This reminds me of the time Blakey confessed that he hated Morbius posts.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @DrPepper said:

    @Lorne Kates said:
    SO I PUT UP WITH IT.

    Hi Lorne. This morning I posted a glowing praise of your work on the Halloween entry -- beautiful stuff. NOT AT ALL LIKE THIS POST. Way to take yourself down a couple of notches.

    I disagree. I couldn't make it through the entire Halloween post (though I admit I'm not a big Lovecraft fan, either). I skipped to the comments to get the quick summary. Of course, that was more difficult than it should have been. Also, the styling of this post isn't attacking my rss reader, so it has that going for it.



  • @silverpie said:

    "Oh please, þat piece of shit can't even type þ"

    I þink it's spelled ðat. Slightly different sound (þick, þin, ðese, ðose).

     

    (edited for consistency)

    I prefer typewriters manufactured during þe period of Old English when þ could be used interchangeably for voiced or unvoiced labio-dental fricatives. It's easier to find new ribbons.



  • @Gurth said:

    Still doesn't mean manipulating images is basic functionality of a word processor.
    This. If manipulating images were basic functionality, even Word would be an utter failure.

    I've done DTP in Word, and manipulating images is painful*. On the same order as bashing your forehead against the wall, repeatedly. Nudge a picture 0.1", and Word decides to move the text it's attached to, so the picture jumps several inches, or to a different page. Using absolute positioning relative to the page (which is not the default, and takes quite a few mouse clicks to invoke, individually, for every single picture in the document) helps, but is still vulnerable to jumping to a different page if the text to which it is attached moves. I can't even imagine how badly a buggy clone would handle this.

    @Emu said:

    Word likes to totally fk up lists if you try anything other then a simple bullet list?
    It is considered acceptable to spell out the f--- word on this forum.

    My main list problem is with numbered lists. Numbered lists with unnumbered paragraphs between the numbered ones are flaky -- sometimes it continues the numbering where it left off; sometimes it restarts from 1, without any obvious logic that I have been able to determine -- annoying, but livable.

    In my experience, Word's number two WTF, behind picture positioning (which I needed to do very often several years ago, but is generally a rare task for me), is trying to delete manual page breaks. I recently spent hours reformatting a document that was badly formatted, with a lot of section and page breaks. Word, if I delete a page break, that means I want the text that is being forced onto the next page to be on this page. Why in the world do you think I want you to convert the previous continuous section break into a page break, so that the text is still on the next page???

     

    * Having my (ex-)wife as the Client From Hell didn't help.

     



  • @Emu said:

    fk
    @HardwareGeek said:
    f---

    GUESSING TIME



  • @Lorne Kates said:

      I did start on Word Perfect 5.1, and got very good at that. But the benefit of using Word and having things like on screen menus far outweighed any nostalgic benefit WP51 might have had. =)

    I started on word perfect 4.3 and 5.1 was a massive improvement, including the introduction of ... (Wait for it) ... Onscreen menus. Alt =


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Zemm said:

    I started on word perfect 4.3 and 5.1 was a massive improvement, including the introduction of ... (Wait for it) ... Onscreen menus. Alt =
    That takes me back. All our computers at college had these cards glued to the keyboards that described all the WP key combinations, and there were lots. Every combination of modifier keys and function keys appeared to have been taken up with something. Anything you might ever want to do was one keystroke away! Finding that keystroke might take several minutes staring through a lot of text that was slightly too small for a normally-sighted person to read at the normal distance of a keyboard from your eyes.

    I took one look at that card, thought “fuck it”, and did all my assignments in Emacs and LaTeX. For simplicity.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    The most basic thing a word processor does, is enable you to write text in a convenient manner and — if/when you want to — print out that text. Just about everything related to formatting that text, never mind graphics, is encroaching into what is properly DTP software territory.

    That would be text editor, and in that manner, emacs or vi is far superior to both Word and OO.o's Write.

    However, by your logic, every kid who needs to as much as print out an essay title in a different font should get him/herself a DTP suite. What.

    I didn't say that — what I did say is that any layout features are not basic functionality of a word processor. The difference between a text editor and a word processor is very hard to really put your finger on, since both have essentially the same function (allow people to input text) and their capabilities in text manipulation overlap quite far these days. The difference, really, is what they're used and optimized for: text editors for more technical work like working with source code etc., word processors for working with prose. That may seem trivial, but it's quite different functionality when you get down to it. Yes, that means that a lot of programs might be a text editor to one person and a word processor to another.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Nudge a picture 0.1", and Word decides to move the text it's attached to, so the picture jumps several inches, or to a different page. Using absolute positioning relative to the page (which is not the default, and takes quite a few mouse clicks to invoke, individually, for every single picture in the document) helps, but is still vulnerable to jumping to a different page if the text to which it is attached moves.

    And then select a different printer. Enjoy!


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