Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "DistroTube Is Wrong About Word Processors!" video.

  1.  @BrodieRobertson  Most people work for large organisations. The decisions on what software to use are made at a very high level (by people who probably aren't competent to make the choice) and the peons have no alternative but to go along with that. We might know a FOSS alternative that is as good, or better, but they are not going to be able to use it, even if they want to spend the time to learn it.
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  2. I know what you mean. There's an adage that most users only use about 10% of a word processor's features; but each user employs a different 10%. What's needed is some way of guiding people to the subset of features that will help them. In the old days, we said RTFM: but these days, there is no FM. I still tend to use manual formatting rather than style sheets, as I no longer submit stuff to publishers. It's not very efficient.
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  3. Can I ask why you bother about page breaks in something that's not going to be printed? And most WPs have a draft mode, or equivalent, which won't bother you. Conversely, I was helping a friend who had to submit something one page (A4) long. She asked me to edit it; whenever you edit someone else's stuff, you can always cut out words, so I did that until it just nicely occupied the page -- easy to see in a word processor. Sent it back to her: "Thank you. And it's just the right length. How did you do that?"
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  4.  @BarryBazzawillWilliams  Well, OK 🙂. LibreOffice Writer has a Web view mode, which I think is like the old "Wrap to Window" option in some WP programs. That's the nearest to draft mode, and won't bother you with page breaks.
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  5.  @mgord9518  There's a bit of a non-sequitur in there. LibreOffice (which has its problems but is what we've got) will produce .DOCX files that work for most purposes.
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  6. Plain text is universal? Yeah, right. When I started with little computers, some of my colleagues were using an IBM word processor. Guess who got to be the expert on translating EBCDIC to ASCII? My wife and I were doing a book: the general editor had support at his university computer department, who worked with LaTEX. So guess who learned how to put in LaTEX codes using the simple, austere word processor we were using then. And then the editor lost the support, and I forget what format we ended up with, but I know one author in the bibliography had a Polish given name which was spelt with a z with a dot over it. Long before UTF: so I bought a copy of WordPerfect, and learned it (in so far as anyone actually learned WordPerfect, rather than being quick at navigating the cheatsheet template). The problem, I think, is that a lot of the people who pontificate about Linux are developers and sysadmins (to whom, respect) for whom writing is producing documentation for other professionals. But a lot of writing IRL is for publication, either in dead tree or e-book format, and what publishers want is Word format files, and they want authors to do all the formatting for what used to be called camera-ready copy. (Maybe if you're a best seller, this doesn't apply, but it's the way it works in academic publishing). For this purpose, word processors don't do a fully professional job, but they will produce a passable result that's good enough for academic publishing. Though I observe that publishers still have difficulties with getting footnotes done properly in ebooks. Publishers (outside the technical sphere, perhaps) do not want LaTEX any more than they want nroff, they want .DOC or .DOCX. Commercial and advanced FOSS word processors can get incompatible (hell, MS Word can be incompatible with itself if there's enough of a gap in versions and platforms), but that only applies to pretty recondite sorts of usage. These days, for the sort of thing that markdown does, the compatibility is good. Especially if you use .RTF, which is proprietary, indeed, but MS is not making any money out of it, and .RTF will tell you if you're doing something too intricate for it. Where word processors can be, and certainly used to be, evil is when there's a monopoly. Microsoft used to change the .DOC format with every upgrade. This would to drive the massive sale of upgrades by a simple mechanism. It used to be a rule in large organisations that the person who had the very latest desktop PC was the CEO's PA. So, an EDICT would be issued from the desk of the Supreme Manager. It would be typed up (and probably corrected for grammar and spelling) by the CEO's PA (or, as it was in those days, Secretary) and she (as it was in those days) would promulgate it to the masses. Since the CEO's PA/Secretary was a very intelligent and capable person (probably smarter than the CEO), she was in complete command of the new version of Word, and would use its new features. So when the message came to the peons, and they opened it in their old versions, they could not access the guidance of the Dear Leader in all its fullness, and so each department paid for upgrades, and so was increased Bill Gates' fortune (ill-gotten, but now used well). And if you want pure, undistracted, composition of a first draft, nothing beats paper and a 2B pencil.
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