We all know that you write serious papers in LaTeX, right? Any self-respecting computer scientist composes his formula-laden treatises in the only program that can insert negative spaces exactly where you need them. I generally like Pages, but its lack of integration with a citation manager (other than the godawful Endnote) makes it a no-go. I have tried alternatives, but they are universally worse. In trying to be everything to everybody, Word does many things very, very poorly. Just how poorly integrated some of Word’s features are becomes apparent when you try to add comments to a figure inside a text box (you can’t) or replace the spaces before the square brackets inserted by a citation manager with non-breaking ones (Word replaces the entire citation rather than just the opening bracket, even though only the bracket matches the search). Placing and moving figures is problematic to say the least. Even simple things like figure captions and references are broken in interesting ways. Word has a long history ( it was first released in 1983, over 30 years ago), and carries an enormous amount of baggage. Especially for a program that has been around for so long and is used by millions of people every day. But that it’s possible for me to delete something I can’t see and thus screw up my entire document has to be some sort of cruel joke. That may be the case, I really do not care. People on Twitter tell me that Word stores formatting information in invisible characters at the end of paragraphs. Now the last page is gone, but the entire document was also just switched from a two-column layout to a single column. So I select the entire line after the last paragraph and delete that. It doesn’t get deleted, or it comes back, or I don’t know what. Easy, just delete the space that surely must be there, right? No, deleting the space does nothing. Among some other minor edits on the final version of a paper, I tried to get rid of the blank page after the last one. The impetus for this posting came from yet another experience with one of the most widely used programs in the world.
#DOCEAR SCRIVENER SOFTWARE#
How is it possible that this fairly straightforward category of software is so outdated and awful? Microsoft Word Whether it’s writing or citation management, there are countless issues and annoyances. The tools of the trade for academics and others who write research papers are among the worst software has to offer.
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