Plain text plus
Dec. 15th, 2005 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinBrad DeLong's lament about Word leads to a bunch of people piling on modern computer interfaces and longing for simpler days.
I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.
What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.
I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.
What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-15 08:19 pm (UTC)But then, when I want to print the notes, I wish Word weren't WYSIWIG, because I want to print them at 8 point in two columns, and trying to navigate a two-column document using the keyboard in Word is (as far as I've discovered) impossible.