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

MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com> wrote:

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×

Word has unlimited undo and the file saves all versions of your doc.

Do a Save As and all that crap will be gone, shrinking the file by also 5x.

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.