The Sword and Laser discussion
Charles Stross contends Microsoft Word is evil
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Well, while I'm waiting for the site to open, I have a question. Does anyone know if there are going to be any more books in the Laundry Files series?
Read the post. Way too technical for me. However, I did get through college using WordPerfect on a computer operating on DOS 6. I kind of miss the simplicity, not that I'd go back to the days before the mouse. What sucks with Word and other Microsoft Office programs is the way they become less functional with each upgrade rather than more functional. I try to avoid upgrading Office because I hate the learning curve. They destroyed mail merge in Word and pivot tables in Excel.
George R. R. Martin writes ASOIAF in Wordstar in MSDOS.
I worked in a law firm for a while where we used WordPerfect, and files would often get corrupted, seemingly at random, and there was often no way to save them once that happened. So MS Word has a leg up on WP in that regard at least, though I still use the 2003 version because I hate the ribbon interface with a fiery passion.I've written quite a few articles and a short story in Focus Writer, the only "distraction-free" editor I know of that can handle curly-quotes, so that might be a way to go. It saves in rtf and odt so you can use it in tandem with Libre Office only...for long documents (like a novel) I find Focus Writer will randomly insert paragraph returns for no reason leaving huge gaps.
I found my copy of MS Office 2003 at the dump, so make of that what you will.
I use LibreOffice. It does every thing I need it to do. It is free and open source and works great.Why pay for garbage from Microsoft when you can get great software for free. That is the main reason I run linux.
Yes, always more Laundry Files. Most recently, this novella:http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/09/eq...
Why did he stop at Microsoft Word?I have a Linux book from 2001 that mentioned the planned obsolescence of software. Since then we have had Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and now Windows 8.
Linux has lots more distribution and keep changing but the documentation is worse. At least a rationale for the Microsoft changes is easy to understand. MONEY!
Tamahome wrote: "George R. R. Martin writes ASOIAF in Wordstar in MSDOS."That's why each book takes so long to write: all that time spent shoveling coal into the boiler.
Can't these publishers take Charlie's .tex files? After all, they can edit them with vi.
Sandi wrote: "Read the post. Way too technical for me. However, I did get through college using WordPerfect on a computer operating on DOS 6. I kind of miss the simplicity, not that I'd go back to the days be..."They destroyed mail merge in Word because they want you to use access, imho. I have no idea WTH they were thinking with Excel 2010, but it just sucks overall.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...