Now. Why am I wrong for Libre
It’s cause they teach it in school
edit a pdf? Edit your expectations.
I feel seen. The number of times I’ve actually needed to do this is too damn high. Sure, I feel entitled to not have to pay for the privilege, as the task was usually thrust upon me by some bank, HR department, or legal firm. But the number of scummy websites online that will happily play with your doc’s confidential info for free, is too damn high. I can’t imagine anyone with average computer skills navigating this particular turing tarpit unscathed.
I pay for Nitro PDF locally
I (average user) was given a case of sensitive information and told to edit it/update it/reupload it. Using my work device was the expectation…but I had not been granted any paid software to do so.
The IT guy was like “you can use this website” which was almost certainly a violation given the nature of the data. It was maddening because I knew (I also did not use one of those websites).
You can also edit a PDF with LibreOffice Draw
Firefox now allows you to edit PDFs locally, for most use cases it is enough. There is also PDFsam Basic, an open-source tool to divide, merge, extract pages, rotate, etc.
I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown.
The thing I really hate about modern word processors and everyone’s obsession with PDFs is that the vast majority of the time things will never be printed, but everything still focuses on paginated formats. Nobody seems to get this but you can literally send someone a .HTML file that they can just open in their browsers. Even when I tell developers about this they say dumb things like a single file will load slower. Buddy, it’s loading from the disk, it’s not querying shit, it is okay to make it a single HTML file.
But no, fuck you, just pages and PDFs.
The silver lining is that at least Google Docs (I don’t use other editors often) now has a “pageless” mode. But the amount of times I’ve run into weird things like accidentally backspacing the last character of something with special formatting only to undo it, add extra characters temporarily, then backspace in front of it… Fucking hell. Just let me write Markdown. Just let me write Markdown! JUST LET ME WRITE MARKDOWN!
Paginated formats still have advantages even if they are never printed. It just makes referencing stuff so much easier, if you can say “page 451, second headline, third paragraph”.
Nahhhh, you gotta think outside the box. You can tell people section 3, subsection 2, etc. even without pages. I’m addition, check this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#Anchor Click that. See the little but at the end?
#Anchor? We can already use URI fragments to link to specific sections.“But JackbyDev, I’m not linking to a specific section of something in an outline, I need to link to a specific part of long form content, like a novel. I can only do that with pages.”
That’s a good point, but modern browsers have a way to deal with that too. This is where text fragments help: they allow the link author to have full control over what text to link to, without requiring any special markup in the target document. You can use
#:~:text=to link to specific blocks of text.Edit: Lemmy is reformatting that for some reason and makes it not work. Try copying and pasting the below for a working example.https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#%3A%7E%3Atext=This+is+where+text+fragments+help%3A+they+allow+the+link+author+to+have+full+control+over+what+text+to+link+to%2C+without+requiring+any+special+markup+in+the+target+document.Edit 2: Apparently Lemmy reformats links in preformat snips. Amazing. Maybe slap this into the URL bar
en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#:~:text=This%20is%20where%20text%20fragments%20help%3A%20they%20allow%20the%20link%20author%20to%20have%20full%20control%20over%20what%20text%20to%20link%20to%2C%20without%20requiring%20any%20special%20markup%20in%20the%20target%20document.after pastinghttps://developer.mozilla.org/Nothing more frustrating that trying to show people a very cool and useful feature of browsers only for a different tool to just ruin it.I think you just proved my point.
None of that is nearly as simple and accessible to non-techy people as page numbers. A page number would also not have been scrabled by Lemmy.
(I of course do know about link anchors and all that, but it’s just a hassle to use.)
No, that’s a Lemmy bug. If it’s screwing up URLs like that it could affect other URLs too. Not a bug of text fragments. Text fragments are still relatively new. Firefox only began supporting them last year. Annoyingly, to create then in Firefox you still need to go into
about:configor use an extension. But still, the idea that we should favor paginated format just because you can say “page blah” when we have better ways is foolish. Saying “Search for the phrase ‘blah blah blah’” works equally well without text fragments.And yes, it’s annoying that anchor links are too difficult to link to. But again, the idea that we should accept all the baggage of paginated formats just because anchors tend to be done incorrectly is foolish as well.
The point was that text fragments, link fragments and even “search for the phrase X” are things that are brittle and require software support that’s not necessarily a given. Having to enable experimental features of adding extensions are far too much hassle for the average user.
I honestly don’t see what “baggage” paginated formats have. If you don’t like pagination, turn it off in your PDF viewer. That’s much easier to do than to get all software in your tool chain to work correctly with text fragments.
Not a bug of text fragments.
This is a pretty foolish statement. It’s totally immaterial “who” is at fault if the feature doesn’t work. You did not manage to send a working text fragment over Lemmy. Doesn’t matter what in the chain screwed up.
I can tell you the page to turn to via a phone call or even in person. Try sending a text fragment by telling it to someone. Text fragments are a nice little feature but far too technical to adequately replace pagination in all circumstances.
How often are you in the scenario that you you’re on a phone call and need to tell someone where something is in a document versus communicating with them online where you can send a link though? Every work meeting I’ve been in for the past nearly a decade now has been through something like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc. where I can send text.
Also PDF viewers are the baggage in the scenario. Everyone uses web browsers everyday. PDF viewers are the odd one out in the majority of people’s “tool chains”.
Even easier, for a markdown (text) file, you could just tell someone the line to go to.
If people used markdown instead, then everyone would have nice text editors installed which would make this easy.
Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).
If stuff like this was adopted, integrations could be very nice (with easier solutions than saying “go to x page and look for x header”, I could even imagine links being a thing assuming this feature is developed).
Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).
Why don’t you just ctrl+f in a word doc/PDF? That’s still possible, but it’s not exactly of much help in many cases. E.g. if the headline you are looking for is the name of a basic concept that appears all over in the document. Page 512 only appears once.
All other forms of indexing are content-dependant. Indexing by page works the same on any page-based document.
You can of course, but I was specifically pointing out how slow word is when doing any search query.
Page 512 or line 10054, more or less the same thing right?
Didn’t think about duplicate header names, in those cases I guess you would need to be given a line number to go to if someone’s sharing a section for you to see.
I don’t use word collaboratively that heavily so maybe people telling you to “see page 512” is common and I can see how saying “go to line 100512” is harder. I’m sure nothing would stop editors from introducing a feature for fake page numbers.
There will always be certain drawbacks though, most may be fixed by editors having nice UX, others maybe not.
A good example for what I mean with the header names is e.g. the datasheet of a microcontroller. For e.g. the Atmega328p, that’s a PDF with a few hundred pages.
If you search for a section explaining a feature, and you CTRL+F for the name of the feature, which is the headline of the corresponding section, you will get matches for the same exact string of characters all over the document: first in the feature list in the beginning of the document, then on the pinout, then in the text of any other feature that references the feature you are looking for, then in the appendices and lastly in the glossary. Somewhere in the middle of these potentially 100s of matches will be the correct one.
After a while of using that document, you will have the most important page numbers memorized.
If it’s a headline, you’ll find it in the index, from where you can jump to the right page.
Yes, if you have pagination.
But how are you going to package it as part of a subscription and make billions off that idea? You need to go back to capitalism school!
Hehe i’ll start a company that charges you 30/month/user for markdown tech tips.
Then i’ll make my own markdown editor that adds proprietary non-standard features to lock you into my ecosystem.
Counterpoint: LaTeX
If LaTeX is being used to produce paginated output for people to view that will exclusively never be printing it then I have a lot of the same gripes. Though any sort of non-WYSIWYG format is more enjoyable in my mind.
Obsidian. Great notes app with a ton of features and is free.
Open source too, I think,but could be wrong on that. I usually am. But it’s all in markdown baby! I use it for my dnd world and notes.Unless they’ve open-sourced it in the last year or so, Obsidian isn’t open source. That being said, it does have big vibes of open source. Like, there’s more to open source than simply the source code being available — it’s also about the general ethos of openness. When I was using Obsidian, I felt reassured that my notes were my own, and they would still function mostly the same if Obsidian went under. It’s a big part of why I switched to it from Notion
Obsidian is an org-mode/org-roam wannabe
Yeah, but getting into org-mode low key feels like the tinkering equivalent of starting a heroin habit. I say this as someone who basically lives in org-mode nowadays. I am the weird kind of person who relishes the learning curve, and for me, getting to tinker with my tools helps keep me motivated to actually use my note taking systems. I think that people like me are outliers though.
That is to say that I don’t think “wannabe” is the right word, because Obsidian isn’t trying to be org-mode. I’d maybe call it “org-mode lite”, because of how it takes some of those features and repackages them to be more accessible to a wider audience. I don’t think that’s a bad thing though — indeed, Obsidian was my gateway drug to where I am now
Obsidian is nearly perfect. My biggest gripe is the link format it uses, even when using Markdown style, doesn’t use the full relative path to files, just the name of the file. So you can’t click them in say, VS Codium and have them work.
My perfect tool would be something like Obsidian but uses the GitHub Pages approach while not being tied to GitHub. (The GitHub Pages gem fails in a few ways if the repository doesn’t have a GitHub remote.)
I just wish that obsidian would let me self host a server with their software.
You may want to check out Typora.
I must be the odd one. I find PDFs easy to use, convenient, easy to edit, and manageable. The business world relies quite a bit on PDF. The whole point of PDFs is that they can easily be printed, signed, be fillable forms, or stored as a single file where the size can be adjusted to fit storage requirements. The only issue I have with them is so many editors all want money for the ability to edit them whereas other document formats have software like LibreOffice that are free. I get you’re probably good at markdown, but the rest of the business world that relies on PDFs and can barely handle them or open a web browser. Their brains would melt if they couldn’t simply open or print a single file.
Are you an accessibility remediator? I feel like they are the ones who like PDFs the most.
No. I simply find them easy to use. Maybe it’s because familiarity, but I see nothing inherently difficult with saving a document as PDF, and making them form-fills with the right software isn’t too hard. When someone is sent a contract or something they tend to be used to looking at what they would see on paper, PDFs tend to be what they’re used to and very basic WYSIWYG, so people don’t have to think too hard about it.
You find PDFs easy to edit? Also, there’s no reason why you can’t make a single HTML file the way you make a single PDF file. It’s not done in the web for organization and optimization reasons, but it’s still possible.
Also, what do you mean about resizable? Open a web browser, adjust the width. Look at the text. Watch as it moves. Do that with a PDF, absolutely not the same. PDFs have a static size.
Form filling with HTML is easy too. https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp
Resizable as in file size. PDF quality is easily adjustable when saved.
I’m using Libre office at the moment to actually write something more than a few pages, and it’s English dictionary is missing like 50% of the English language.
*its
Give him a break, typing with libreoffice. He didn’t know
“Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft”
I finally realized a couple years ago that I don’t need an office suite or fancy email client anymore and I ripped it all out. No more LibreOffice and no more Thunderbird.
Now all I use is AbiWord and Gnumeric for my simple needs. I am finally liberated!
Yo! AbiWord is rad! Thanks for the recommendation. This always put me off using LibreOffice. It is so bloated with features nobody uses. Or maybe its actually and the design and UX is just horrible.
Boy oh boy, I can’t wait to use Libre Office Writer and have the exact same issues, but only half the features!
I’m going to be honest and I mean this sincerely.
What features has word added in the last decade that are actually impactful?
I wouldn’t mind some book writing features, like the ability to jump to chapters, and maybe text previews of each. I don’t think Office does this either, but it would be nice. Also…why does it use an English dictionary that’s missing like 30% of the language?
Collaborative editing is the main thing that puts it above Libre in a professional setting.
I use Libre at home, but at work MS Office wins 😕
Online LibreOffice exists and is called Collabora: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
Works great, for example in Nextcloud.
Ok but that isn’t really word in the libre office sense. That’s more Microsoft 365, which is fair I guess because I don’t even know if you can buy the actual software anymore.
Are you able to do the collaborative editing in the local software or is it just the browser based Google docs equivalent?
Yes, I can collaboratively edit within the desktop MS Word app. The online version is objectively worse for that, ironically.
Might have something to do with Microsoft offering M365 to nearly all universities for dirt cheap or free.
Don’t agree to Microsoft’s terms of service? Guess university isn’t for you.
Whoever stole my MS office, I’ll find you. You have my Word.
I hate you so much.
Have my upvote.
PowerPoints at you, enthusiastically.
You Excel at this
I cannot Access the words to describe this.
Excellent!
Everyone complaining here about not being able to have unique footers or moving images or ignoring spelling errors just doesn’t know what they’re doing. You’re literally the bad workman blaming the tool. I can do all of those things in Word.
If you prefer another tool, fine. But please stop shitting on things just because you don’t understand them.
And PDF was never meant to be edited. Its sole purpose is to give you a document file which comes out exactly the same on computer screens and printers everywhere. Compact, reliable, compatible. If you need to replace parts of a PDF document post publication, it should be prepared using the Forms tools that are readily available in all good PDF suites.
By the way: I paid 30 Euros for an Office 2019 lifetime license. If ever that should not receive further updates then I’m ready to fork over another 30.
then I’m ready to fork over another 30.
30 per month now probably
No, for another license that will last me another seven years or however long their service period is. I think I actually have an LTSC license so it might be longer.
And PDF was never meant to be edited
Lol what kind of dumb shit is this to say? There are tons of pdf editors out there, its fucking 2025 and we have incredible technology. Your entire post comes across as a pathetic apologist for multil billion dollars companies.
The web was also never meant to be dynamic. And yet.
It was a apologist statement without a doubt. It was the equivalent of nuh uh.
Word is garbage for what people pay for it. Still charging for the same old software decades later only everything has been rearranged for your convenience err I mean vendor lock in.
Again, I can fully understand if you like other tools better. More power to ya, competition is healthy and all that. But the complaints I specifically addressed are simply unfounded.
I’m not a fanboy nor do I get paid to defend Microsoft. But I have worked with Microsoft Office for 30 years now, and I do get paid to train people how to use it.
99% of users just don’t have the fuckingest clue how anything works in Word. Most can’t even tell a line break from a paragraph break and people still use their PC like a typewriter to indent text…in 2025 🙄
Word is like any other word processor nowadays. Pretending it is something special is patently ridiculous.
I was around before Word ever existed and I was never impressed because it was never impressive. In fact, I have been continually disappointed by the changes they have made to promote vendor lock in.
I remember when their was a difference between the return key and the enter key.
Pretending it is especially unusable, you mean? Hard agree. Absolute cringe. In fact, that was my entire point.
Nowhere did I write a glowing recommendation of Word as the superior word processing software of today. In fact, I acknowledged several times that there are other valid options out there.
And I’m getting mighty tired of this bad faith argumentation style.
I will gladly speak to that. Is it unusable? No, it works.
That is not saying much though. I have a ton of legitimate gripes about Word. I think their greatest sin in usability was breaking the pull down menu system which was pretty much universal in favor of the dreaded ribbon bar.
Then not standardizing the ribbon bar and instead constantly shuffling around where things are found from version to version. It was and even to this day absolutely infuriating. The reason they did this, to promote vendor lock in is even more messed up.
Their next biggest problem is file interoperability. Not only did did they insert their foot into any file standardization process they also even broke their own standards to once again promote vendor lock in.
MS spent a ton of time and resources breaking standards just to force people to use their product. Excuse me if that makes me dislike them. I don’t hate them because I have trouble formatting documents (although image manipulation in word is absolutely ass to this day).
I don’t like them because they are a shit company selling the same old garbage repackaged with a bow. Word should have been free software over a decade ago. Instead, people keep paying them and they keep coming up with worse ideas.
The newest is disabling autosave unless you have OneDrive installed and activated. I literally could not believe they broke autosave, but they did. Of course they like to say it is even better now with OneDrive but we all know the truth. It is another dose of vendor lock in.
Microsoft is a toxic company that you get to deal with for a living. Getting your feathers ruffled because someone like me is shitting on MS has to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. We can agree on everything I am saying. I am not here complaining why there is a extra space between paragraphs.
I am getting mighty tired of the reality of MS. It was old thirty years ago when I first switched to Linux. They have done so much damage to computing in the name of profits it isn’t funny and Word/Office has always been the gas in their vehicle to do it.
there
its fucking 2025 and we have incredible technology
Yes, and we can modify a VW beetle to turn it into a space ship but why would we?
Yeah, it’s so weird seeing all the ones being proud of their tech illiteracy.
All because, right clicking.
Is too much for their small brains to handle.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable or noobish to expect intuitive functions like drag and drop to work properly.
Word is fucking terrible because the workflow is terrible.
It’s not the end users fault when you consider that literally any alternative works properly.
I don’t know how to explain this to you.
But I have never had a problem, or never seen anyone else have a problem. With right clicking. To change the image formatting. To allow drag and drop.
The only time. Are online threads like these. And with how People talk, it sounds like you’re trying to use Word as if it’s Publisher.
“The issue doesn’t affect me, so it doesn’t exist” lol. It’s bad design, whether you agree with that or not…
What exactly is the bad design. Because that’s never been established.
It’s just people getting pissy that right clicking is too difficult.
You can only design around incompetence so much.
You’re holding it wrong
Microsoft has had a monopoly on office software since the 90s. They illegally leveraged this monopoly to try to destroy competition in other areas. Most infamously, they destroyed Netscape to try to kill competition in the early Internet space. That resulted in a trial for illegally abusing their monopoly which they lost. Then George W. Bush was elected president, and somehow Microsoft effectively got off with essentially no punishment. Admittedly though, part of that was that the judge in the case was so outraged at some of the stuff Microsoft pulled (submitting falsified evidence, having Bill Gates lie under oath repeatedly) that he talked about it in public when he shouldn’t, which opened a door for Microsoft to try to weasel out of the loss.
The “evil” in Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” was widely viewed as being Microsoft. Google was an Internet company in an age where Microsoft was on trial for using their power to make everything about the Internet shitty so that they could control it. In the early days of Google, people weren’t even allowed to use Microsoft software, including Windows, without a special dispensation from the higher-ups. Microsoft effectively avoided any kind of punishment for their abuse of their monopoly, but it distracted them and made them cautious, so they weren’t able to crush Google before it could get going. Before anybody chimes in about how Google is evil, first read up in what Microsoft did. Google might be a bit shady, but where Google got its monopoly by spending hundreds of billions to make its search engine the default, Microsoft used tactics to destroy potential competitors and drive them out of business.
If the US (and the world) had effective enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws, Word would actually have to compete on its own merits. But, because it’s a monopoly, Microsoft can just sit back and keep collecting rent.
Microsoft hurt Netscape, but it was AOL that killed it. At the height of the dotcom bubble, Wall street handed AOL more money than they knew what to do with so AOL bought Netscape. Of course they didn’t have any idea what to do with it (they still kept putting IE on the discs they mailed out to people even when they owned Netscape) and it eventually withered away and died.
The people that ran Netscape correctly predicted it would go this way, but it was a ridiculous amount of money AOL was offering. Luckily they made releasing the code as open source as part of the deal.
No, your revisionist history is wrong. By the time AOL acquired it, Microsoft’s damage had already been done. Its stock price had fallen 50% from its peak value.
The reason AOL didn’t know what to do with Netscape is that it was no longer a viable business due to the interference from Microsoft. Up until Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer for free as part of the OS, the plan for Netscape was to charge for the browser. That was perfectly normal. People charged for every piece of software up until then. But, when they had to compete with Microsoft’s price of free, they had no real business model anymore.
That’s the whole reason that Microsoft was charged with violating antitrust law. They leveraged their operating system monopoly to enter a new business and destroy their main competitor. Even with their falsifying evidence and Bill Gates lying on the stand, it was an open and shut case.
Eh, I was around in that time. Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0 and it was basically as bloated as Netscape Communicator. It wasn’t until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox project that pulled out a browser (and they later pulled out the email client and other things from that monolith) that IE had real competition.But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier? Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover and there really wasn’t a real answer for IE until Firefox. Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator was worse than IE if you didn’t want a browser that took more than 20 seconds to start up and use up all your memory just in case you might want to use an HTML editor.
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time it became the outdated garbage we know it as today, but before that it was Netscape that wasn’t improving their product with similar results.
With technology, people tend to do revisionist history by preferring the better story without regards to the actual quality of the tech. But the reality was IE was actually better than Netscape Communicator (says a lot about how bad Communicator was) just like VHS was actually better than Betamax. Just doesn’t make as good a story when it’s about people using a tech that was better instead of the story being about people using inferior tech because of shenanigans.
Eh, I was around in that time.
So was I.
Netscape communicator was bloated as fuck and people used IE not only because it was pre-installed, but also because it didn’t take ~20 seconds to start up which is what using Netscape Communicator was like.
Netscape Communicator came out in mid 1997. By that time, Netscape was already doomed because of Microsoft’s illegal bundling.
Netscape’s IPO was in early August of 1995. It opened at $28 per share, and closed at $75 per share on that first day. The browser they were selling at that point was Netscape Navigator, and it was by far the best one available. 2 weeks later Microsoft introduced the first version of Internet Explorer. It was terrible, but it was free. Microsoft kept shoving IE in people’s faces for years, making it the default, bundling it with Windows, and doing everything it could to sabotage Netscape’s business.
Microsoft was able to do this because they were able to subsidize the massive losses for R&D on Internet Explorer and IIS by taking money from their monopoly on operating systems. Netscape didn’t have another business, and it’s very difficult to compete with “free”, so they were doomed.
If you look at a graph of Netscape’s share price, it peaked in late 1995 and by 1997 when it released Communicator it was already dying because of Microsoft’s illegal tactics. 6 months after Communicator was released Netscape had to undergo a big round of layoffs. 1 year after that it was bought by AOL.
There’s no way that this is a story of Netscape failing. It’s quite obviously a story of Microsoft using its monopoly illegally to force a competitor in another area out of business. That was proven in the trial.
After a long time Mozilla finally got to 1.0
Netscape Communicator was the 4.0 version of the company’s browser. 1.0 came out in December 1994. 2.0 came out in March 1996. 3.0 Came out in August 1996. This supposedly bloated version you’re talking about was the 4.0 release and came out in June 1997. As evidence they were dying by the time they released communicator, they only managed one more release before they were acquired by AOL.
It wasn’t until
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox projectYou do understand the purpose of the Mozilla Corporation and the Firefox project right? They knew that the company was doomed because of what Microsoft had done, and created the Mozilla non-profit as a kind of life-raft so that the browser didn’t simply die when the company was crushed.
In fact those names you crossed out just support what I’m saying: “Firefox was originally named “Phoenix”, a name which implied that it would rise like a Phoenix after Netscape was killed off by Microsoft.”
that IE had real competition.
You have that completely backwards. At first Netscape was the dominant browser, but as Microsoft used its illegal tactics the usage of Netscape declined until it disappeared. But, as they hoped, Firefox did rise from the ashes of the Netscape company and come to compete with Microsoft. But it was really Chrome that killed off Internet Explorer years after Netscape was driven out of business.
But don’t you think a well managed Netscape could have recognized the problem with Communicator
The Mozilla organization was created before the release of Communicator. They already knew their company was doomed by the time Communicator was released.
and did the same thing as happened with Firefox, just a decade earlier?
A decade earlier? In the 1980s? Tim Berners-Lee didn’t even describe the web until 1990, so I don’t think selling a web browser was a viable business before that.
Netscape kinda just did nothing after the AOL takeover
Yes, because they were driven out of business by Microsoft. We covered that already. Most of the talented people just left. jwz bought a bar and left the technology business entirely.
Yeah we all know IE sucks, but Netscape Communicator
Why are you so focused on Communicator instead of Navigator?
Sure MS stopped improving IE and over time
The problems with IE were never that it “wasn’t improved over time”, it was that it trampled all over standards and intentionally broke things as part of Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
people tend to do revisionist history
You seem to be a revisionist historian who doesn’t know the basics of what they’re talking about.
P.S. As an experiment, take a look at that graph of browser share and see if you can spot when the US government sued Microsoft for abusing its monopoly.
Microsoft did lots of shady shit to leverage their quasi monopoly on PC operating systems. However Microsoft Office was actually better than the competition in many aspects. The main competition for Microsoft Office was IBM’s Smart Suite. Excel left industry leader Lotus 1-2-3 in the dust pretty quickly in the early 1990s. MS Word was also better than market leader WordPerfect. Then in the late 1990s Outlook became leading and is still unmatched by anything else. Softmaker Office is the only office suite that still exists from back then.
WordPerfect was the leading word processing program under DOS. When Windows was released Microsoft screwed with them by not giving them full access to all the Windows APIs (something Microsoft was notorious for). Surprise, surprise, at the same time Microsoft was not giving WordPerfect the API info they needed, they were releasing their own competitive word processor in Word.
But, once WordPerfect got access to the APIs, they produced a word processor that was superior to Word. The only reason that Word took off is that Microsoft aggressively bundled it with everything.
As for Outlook, I’ve never met anybody who actually likes it. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s available by default and it’s the only thing compatible with emails from other Outlook users. There’s a reason its nickname is “outhouse”. Outlook did the same things that Microsoft did with HTML and HTTP: embrace, extend, extinguish. They took de-facto and de-jure email standards and modified them so that only other Outlook users could use the email properly. They made sure that if you tried to use anything other than Outlook with Microsoft Exchange, that it wouldn’t quite work right.
With Microsoft it’s always about taking their monopoly in one area and squeezing another area, driving their competitors away. It’s what they’re now doing with developer tools, like github and visual studio code.
MS Word is significantly worse than WordPerfect. Reveal codes FTW.
There is currently* nothing Microsoft Office does that I can’t happily do in LibreOffice
The only thing I miss is Excel. Nothing even compares. I use other stuff now, but man my spreadsheets used to be beautiful. Lol
Capitalism? Or nice things? Your decision.
You prefer feudalism?
That is literally the only other way to organize things, yes. Absolutely. One can only be capitalist or feudalist. God you’re smart for catching my bullshit there.
Ah, you’re a fan of dictatorships then?
Only feudal ones, as established.
Plenty of nice things in capitalism
In its gut, being digested, sure
Want to work with .docx files written in English from someone who lives in a country whose main language isn’t English? Better enjoy all your English words being marked as mispelt because fuck you.
Or maybe it’s because they were too stupid/lazy to Select All and set the text language to English? Even so, you can do that at any time as well.
The specific files are generated automatically through some process based on a template, so I think they’d need to fix it there. I don’t really deal with them myself, just remember seeing a coworker struggle with one.
$150
Per year, by the way
massgrave.dev that’s all I’m gonna say.
I’d rather use a free alternative than run a script off a random website
Would you prefer their GitHub?
I also use libreoffice but these people are far from a random website.
Yeah, sure, but Microsoft Word web app scrolls smoother than native LibreOffice Writer on my laptop (on Linux), and there are also other bits of LibreOffice that sucks and have sucked for years.
I think the main difference here is: You don’t have to pay for libre office.
Want to make the header or footer on this page unique? Eat a bag of dicks.
Want to add a letter to an item in a table without fucking up the formatting of every document ever created across known time and space? Guck you.
Spell checking for this comment coming to you from Microsoft
I use SwiftKey - so that’s legitimately true.
Y’know, you can turn off auto correction. It’s the first thing I do with any keyboard on any smartphone.
I’m a Microsoft user. I don’t want solutions - I want to bitch about stuff.
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