Well, duh. It's because of Microsoft's megalomanic desire to rule the world and their success thereat.
I do accept that it's easiest to do business when we're all working with the same tools. It's unfortunate that MS won that battle. (If I'd bought a lot of MS stock early on, I might have a different opinion as regards to how fortunate it is that things ended up that way....LOL!)
Yes, that's why Bill Gates is shown as a Borg in the top icon here:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/0...t-To-Issue-Emergency-Fix-For-Windows-LNK-Flaw
(in case you were wondering why Windows updated itself yesterday)
The ubiquteness of Word has as much as or more to do with Microsoft's marketing practices than technical superiority.
Because word is easiest to get, most commonly used, and pretty much every other writing software out there lets you save in word format.
It's the "easiest to get" if you get it on a Windows computer. Windows already comes with Wordpad and Notepad. I often use Wordpad in text mode (talk about limiting myself! But it makes it easy to, for example copy-and-paste into an online post and the formatting comes out exactly as I expected), something that would make a lot of people cringe. People get upset when their "word processor" won't make a daiquiri for them.
Text (.txt) is probably the lowest common denominator, and doc is not even compatible with itself. It would seem to me that writers would be among the most ardent supporters of
open document formats.
So Word and doc have become the defacto standard. I think we should be working to change that.
When/if I actually submit something, I suppose I'll open it with Word (really OpenOffice Writer), click the "double space" icon, save as .doc, and attach and send that.
I type and when I'm done, I have my manuscript.
Your typewriter had proportional fonts and Times New Roman???
Woops, I snipped out this part:
I'm not sure what you mean by separating content from presentation, but writing in Word is, for me, invisible. It's no different than when I used to type on a typewriter.
There. I don't believe it's no different. You don't have to change ribbons for one thing.
I have no idea what is meant by separating content from presentation. You open a word processing program. You type. You save. Repeat as needed.
It's actually quite simple:
This is content.
This is presentation.
Also, I've had many word processors and text editors that can't do rtf or doc, but that's effectively in a previous life. At least they all did .txt though I think some may have called it .tex. And the first .doc files I saw were actually plain .txt with documentation on how to run a program.
At least I don't go back to EBCDIC.
It is a pity. Plain text
and HTML are is universal. But most people think it's "easier" to use a gargantuan word processor that they have great difficulty in learning to configure and control, and which loves to crash and corrupt data.
Also, free software doesn't make a lot of money for Micro$oft.
I love AkelPad (or gedit, or whatever).
I would not have recognized HTML on my Apple ][ but I would have figured out it was some formattting code like for a runofff program.
It may be the most commonly used, but it is most definitely not the easiest to get. Far from it.
It came with a "package" system on my Dell in 1999, so it was effectively "free" though of course the cost of Word and Windows were built into the price of the computer, and pretty much invisible. I have little idea how much it cost to have Word on that computer.
But yeah, there's dozens or hundreds of word processors you can get legally and for free on the Web.
Export it from what? Word? Nothing "adds" html code when exporting. What happens during export is the process exposes html code in text that's already formatted. Pure text (.txt) has no code (like in Notepad) because it has no formatting.
Even .txt format is a format, and has options. Do you hit return at between 70 and 80 columns, making each line printable just as you see it on the screen? Or only at the end of a sentence? One return at the end of a paragraph, or two? And don't use tabs, they're a "legit" ASCII character, but different text editors/word processors/printers format them differently.
From Pages. I have no clue what Word does.
I take it you don't use Word, but I could easily hear that from Word users...
Huh? My rtfs are less than half the size of my .docs.
And we're talking something like a few hundred kilobytes at most for the big ones, anyway. I'll worry about my 3 gigabyte movies if I'm worried about disk space.
Most of my writing files I have saved in .pages, .rtf, .doc, and .pdf.
Well yeah, if you're worried about disk space, save in .txt and then .zip it. You could even put several novels on a FLOPPY DISK doing that. It's INCREDIBLE what technology we had, even back in the late 1970's!
ETA:
I'm HAPPY with word and always have been. I don't like change when it comes to what I use to write with. I don't want the distractions of learning some new fangled flibbertygibbetty type gizmotronic whatchamacallit. I'm happy as a pig in poop with word and I will always and forever remain thusly so. thusly. so there.
I'm
HAPPY with my ASR-33!
