Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!i2pn.org!i2pn2.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Microsoft makes a lot of money, Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture =?UTF-8?B?ZGVzaWduZXI/?= Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2024 17:17:05 +0000 Organization: Rocksolid Light Message-ID: <316efe1de12954903ea5b66113fc89f2@www.novabbs.org> References: <87h6ab33p3.fsf@localhost> <451b6f3b701e89f1664e6594ce8bfead@www.novabbs.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: i2pn2.org; logging-data="3318430"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@i2pn2.org"; posting-account="65wTazMNTleAJDh/pRqmKE7ADni/0wesT78+pyiDW8A"; User-Agent: Rocksolid Light X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 4.0.0 X-Rslight-Posting-User: ac58ceb75ea22753186dae54d967fed894c3dce8 X-Rslight-Site: $2y$10$138bMeFEmAQy63dLHMYnF.eNZc.1KenOj1ea7eEb/XikK85GdV136 Bytes: 4346 Lines: 62 On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 8:58:56 +0000, David Brown wrote: > On 24/09/2024 05:05, MitchAlsup1 wrote: >> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 0:53:14 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: >> >>> Anybody producing large amounts of high-quality, complex textual >>> material > (e.g. technical documentation) is inevitably going to >>> have to move beyond WYSIWYG tools and adopt some kind of markup >>> system. >> >> I disagree. >> >> Word is just fine as long as all your drawings are *.jpg. >> >> What feature do you think is missing ?? > > My experience with MS Word (mainly supporting it and helping others) is > that a major missing feature is "can handle large documents without > trashing them or exponential growth of file sizes". Perhaps that's been > improved in the last decade or so, but it certainly used to be the case > that any Word document of more than about 20 pages was a gamble. If the > same file was edited by people using different versions of MS Office, or > on machines where the fonts used in the document were not available, you > were pretty much guaranteed disaster. I happen to be using Word from Student 2003 CD-ROM I have used it to create documents up to 500 pages in length Nobody but me does any editing These contain: a) headers and footers b) Paragraph index c) Figures index d) Table index e) lots of cross references f) appendixes But I do notice that when converted to *.pdf the file shrinks by 5× > The most impressive case I have seen of file size explosion was from > Excel, rather than Word. There was a common file on one of our servers > that was used for lists of some type of document and numbers. There > were perhaps a half-dozen people that edited that file on occasion, over > a period of many years. Then someone asked me for help because they > couldn't open the file. It turned out the file was over 600 MB in size. > I opened it with LibreOffice without trouble, saved it again in xlsx > format, and it was now about 40 KB and worked fine with Excel again. I had one case where I broke my 500 page document into 2 (later 3) documents that the combined size dropped by a factor of 2.5×. The original had become large than I could e-mail (and before I discovered the 5× size advantage of *.pdf.) > Word is okay for quick, short and low-quality documents. It's rare to > see good typography in a Word document because it is a lot of effort, or > at least a lot of effort to learn. You /can/ use outline mode and make > a half-decent structured document, but few people do. Would you care to read one of mine and address whether is it "of quality" or not ?? > There are, of course, other WYSIWYG tools that do a better job. But > learning to make quality documentation is a skill few people seem to > appreciate, regardless of the tools they use.