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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Microsoft makes a lot of money, Is Intel exceptionally
 unsuccessful as an architecture designer?
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2024 10:58:56 +0200
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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.

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.

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.

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.