Re: Microsoft makes a lot of money, Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?

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.