Not 100% what you mean there DraQ?
General / Off-Topic British SciFi author Charles Stross: Die, MS Word, DIE!
- Thread starter Susimetsa
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Not 100% what you mean there DraQ?
Because of its ubiquitousness, it's a widely supported proprietary format though. Ideologically, that's not good of course, but practically, it's not much of issue. And you can save as RTF/HTML/etc, or even go as mundane as copy and paste, if you do need to be compatible with something that doesn't do DOC.
Since version 2010, I've even grown to quite like it.
That is true, albeit less so than some years ago. You can change the ".docx" extension on a file to ".zip" to see its contents in bonkers-but-readable form (which doubles as a handy way to extract images).
I am not going to get sucked in, but to clarify for anyone.
A .docx 'document' is a file structure contained in a zip file, the contents of which are OpenXML format. This at least is a step in more collaborative direction from the ridiculous .doc format.
The efficiency of what it creates is open to debate.
My day job is in document workflows. Lets just leave it at that.
What standard would you prefer them to request? Whatever they would change to others would complain about.
One thing many forget about Word is that as a DTP lite software it's great. Image manipulation is very easy for instance. Its corporate features are nice too, like integrated flowcharts and tables, auto-ToC, and some great defaults for writing Business Plan style documents. On the business side it has a lot of useful stuff that most users don't touch but some of us really appreciate. Plus it exports to pdf format much more reliably (WYSIWYG) than any other Word-style program I've used.
But for creative writing I tend to use Google Docs, since it's immensely convenient to access and edit files from anywhere and I don't care much for fancy features. Except for drabbles - Word's in-line wordcount is rather handy for those.
Well, some publishers nowadays also accept .rtf and some other formats - I've not seen anyone accepting .odf yet, though. It is the industry standard that is bothersome to authors.
Libre and Open Office both export perfectly good PDFs as well - they even have a button for the export function right in the top panel. They also have inline word count function, so there's really no reason to pay for Word.
And, in my case, I would get the Office pack pretty cheaply through my work, if I wanted to. I just don't want to.
But there is reason to pay for Excel, and Word comes with it. Plus in my past experience (admittedly a couple of years ago) Open Office was very funny about exporting documents with pictures in them to PDF. It did the job, but it didn't always come out the same.
Google Docs is also inconsistent with PDF exports. For instance if I export my Anthology story to PDF it screws up the formatting on the poetry - I have to go through Word to get it right. Word I've always found to be reliable for this.
Libre and Open Office have developed a great deal over the past couple of years. I used to have problems with them and had to save often to avoid losing stuff, but nowadays they are perfectly good for novel writing. And I haven't had any problems with PDF export either - although I have not tried it with many images etc.
I have no great need to use Libre Spreadsheet at home, so I cannot say much of it other than that it works for simple stuff. At work I use Excel, naturally.
I have no great need to use Libre Spreadsheet at home, so I cannot say much of it other than that it works for simple stuff. At work I use Excel, naturally.