Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
So many open source options out there that if you think MS word is the only options out there then you’re not looking hard enough.
Editing PDFs is not a feature the format natively supports (or supported?).
To me the crappiest “feature” is that M$ intentionally disregards their own document standard to EEE the ecosystem and vendor-lock their consumers.To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It’s like trying to “edit” the ingredients of a cake after it’s finished. You don’t edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
And yet… libreoffice does it pretty ok
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It’s a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it’s possible to edit PDFs but of cause it’s a pain in the ass because that format doesn’t have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn’t understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It’s a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it’s a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it’s more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
Well yeah, because it’s not feasible to deconstruct a baked cake, not because “things that are made shouldn’t be edited”.
It’s also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn’t have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
Except there are programs that can edit pdfs fine.
My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.
Once you’ve tried VIM, you’ll never go back.
Mostly because you won’t be able to exit VIM.
I would use word for this, but I can’t close vim. I guess I’m learning LaTeX.
Last night, I was talking to my brother - who’s a mathematician by trade - and learned the following from him:
LaTeX is Leslie Lamport’s (hence La) macro package on top of TeX.
I’ve never used it, but for around fifteen years I’ve been working around people who do … And yet I never knew that.
I used it a lot for university… and I did not know that.
I did migrate to pandoc and markdown for a lot of stuff, with custom template files.
An abyssal panda using pandoc. Who could have seen it coming.
Markdown is very useful, but I don’t think I’ve ever written enough to earn template files.
My brother is one of the two smartest people I know and knows a lot of things I didn’t know I didn’t know. He’s earned a lot of respect from me.
I wrote latex template files that the markdown rendered into, that way I could use my own macros and styles.
That is some professional grade typesetting there.
:termyour way to freedomSend help, I ran
:term vim, now I’m double stuck
:q (my face in reaction to this)
It’d be more impressive if you went
ZZ.You called?
:q!
:qa!What a strange emoticon…
Ya, the first few times I used vim (well neovim) I exited by closing the terminal
This why LibreOffice called out Microsoft for using “complex” file formats to lock in Office users
You using complex file formats for vendor lock in
Me using complex file formats because my code base is shite.
We are not the same
Want to edit the header just on page 6? Or feel like being sexy and having a single page in landscape or a different size?
Easy! Just make a bunch of separate documents, export them as PDFs, and merge them in Adobe Acrobat.
I agree lots of things about word sucks. But FYI single page landscape is achieved by using two section breaks. It’s not ideal, but its somewhat understandable given how styles are prioritized. I’ve tried others that work well, but they also suffer on things that word does well that we take for granted.
The way it should be handled is to just let me rotate a single fucking page. It’s 2025 and there is zero excuse for that bullshit.
Like I said, I agree it sucks. I’ve had the exact same thought many times.
If you don’t use \LaTeX, that’s on you.
word documents are compatible with open office and I’ve been able to switch to open office at home with no impact on my ability to save them as .doc files and use them at work or school.
Use LibreOffice
Only Office > Libre Office
I used LibreOffice Writer for my coursework the past semester, and when I used my spouse’s Windows computer to double check the images were correctly placed before submitting a paper they were on completely different pages. This was when I saved it as a .docx, because the only two options accepted were .docx or pdf. I wound up doing everything as a pdf if I needed images, but I think LibreOffice doesn’t have a save as pdf option? Or if it did I missed it, I just used Google Docs to save it as a pdf.
IIRC you have to use the “Export as” option instead of the “Save as” for a .pdf file.
Good to know, at the time my brain was absolutely fried so it doesn’t surprise me that I missed it, lol
PDF is one of those weird “not for editing” formats, like STL. Hence why it’s often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.
It used to be even hackier. You’d have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you’d start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you’d select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan’s Own Favorite Contraptions.
LibreOffice has a native export to PDF. And, if you use (almost) any Linux, you have a PDF printer included.
Print to PDF is the way!
Even better, you can create a “Hybrid PDF” which embeds a second copy of the file in ODT format inside the PDF. This makes it re-editable.
Word supports ODT but it doesn’t support reading these ODT files embedded in PDFs though.
Hello! Thanks for the tip!
I am on Linux but haven’t needed to use office software in nearly 20 years, how do you access the pdf printer? Is that different from saving as a pdf through the menu?
Edit: thanks for the help everyone!
You literally ‘print’ to pdf. Instead of a physical page appearing from the demon box, it will give you a prompt of where to ‘print’ your file. Windows has it too, though I always use the pdf export and not the print. But in a pinch it’s good.
export is typically better as it preserve selectable text, if you print as pdf it will be as flat as a real paper (modern readers will still let you select text but you will be prone to any errors the text recognition can make)
You hit print and select the PDF output. It probably works everywhere you can select a printer.
Windows also has that, but you have to navigate your way out of OneDrive folders.
The PDF printer would be accessed via the Print functionality. It’s a virtual device that renders output to a file instead of a physical printer.
You can export to pdf and the hiccup you encountered is M$ intentionally not following their own format.
There’s a button in the toolbar to export to pdf
LibreOffice is as good as Word. Which sadly means there are still no really good document editors out there.
Yeah but it’s free.
Also there may be no good document editors but there is a good typesetting language.
I’ve been enjoying OnlyOffice myself! (LibreOffice is fine, I just like the UI of OnlyOffice more.)
I switched to onlyoffice not looking back
I too respect the monopoly hostile aggressive territory power abuse into enshittification pipeline business strategy, fellow normal poor
I felt so happy to remember this >20 year old image when I saw the title of this post. I remember finding it very funny back then. Anyway, what’s the appraisal? Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.
would you send that to my mom please?
The real miracle isn’t Word’s features, it’s how it’s still the default after decades of collective pain.
Same reason Windows is still the default on desktop: EEE and vendor-lock.
Used Microsoft Works in the early 2000’s. Only discontinued in 2009 apparently.
At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.
- Word, the top of the line component of the flagship Office product
- Works, their “for home and small business” product that was honestly good enough for basically everyone, to the point you have to ask why anyone would buy Office, which is almost certainly why Works got canned, and
- Wordpad, because a GUI OS is basically useless without a rich text editor.
Where does Microsoft Write enter the equation?
Let me Wikipedia that for you…It was rolled into Wordpad circa Windows 95, and that write.exe is present in newer versions of Windows but it’s basically just a link to Wordpad.
According to Wikipedia, MS Write uses .wri files, which can be opened by LibreOffice 5.1 and later but not by any Microsoft software from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later.
I was just being silly.
Well tough shit, I learned something anyway.
We all did!
If my memory serves, Write supported full text justification, but Wordpad only supported left, center and right justification. So any easy win for Write imo.
