Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.

I actually think microsoft word is a decent software with a bunch of quite advanced feature. But after struggling with my 60 pages business proposal for several weeks, I found that the advanced features are so buggy that editing a document longer than 50 pages will be a soul-destroying experience. Here I list the major idiosyncracies:

1. the diff and merge function which sometimes just doesn't merge correctly
2. the automatic numbering of tables and figures which frequently breaks when I insert a new table
3. worst of all, the OLE object link between word and excel. Buggiest thing ever. Let's say you want to insert a excel number to word and by creating a OLE link, the number in word will automatically update if the original number in excel is changed. However, after you create the OLE link, the speed of word and excel will start to drag to a intolerable degree and both crash every ten minutes. Besides, why in the world a long blank character appears in front of my linked number after I update the link???? Frustrating, considering I have hundrends of such links in the word file.

Thinking about it. The core issue is that microsoft word does not separate the content and presentation. Take Tex/Latex, the legendary publishing system for a example. The decoupling of content from presentation enables the authors to focus on the writing, instead of the look. Latex use plain-text instead of binary files so you are not to bind with a properiotary file format. A latex source file written 20 years can still output beautiful pdf in a second. No backward compatibility issue. As for prettiness of the file produced, latex tramps all existing publishing system. It's joyful just to look at. I still regret that I didn't use latex to produce my biochemstry lab report, since I discovered that the score I get is proportional with the ease of reading my lab report. Substance and form is equally important. And don't get me started on the virtue of latex in the field of citation and cross reference. Really, when I was tweaking the little tricks I made to overcome the limits of words, I was almost in tears when thinking about the joy of latex.

But you can't expect latex to be popular with the average user. It's counter-intuitive and a little beyond their ability. It will only prevail in the tech-savvy crowd and of cource, the science and engineering community. Some projects tries to unite the benefits of the two worlds, bringing together the user-friendliness of word and robustness of latex. I tried two of them, lyx and texmacs, but the installation isn't straightforward enough for average user: first install the miktex base system, then ghostview, then various packages, finally install lyx. But once I get lyx installed, it is the easiest tex frontend I have ever seen.

Some final thoughts. I actually think for pure writing, one doesn't need a publishing system at all. Just use one's text editor of choice. Just type in plain text, without any bells and whistles disrupting your thoughts. Just like what I am doing now. After all the most important criterion of good writing is that your writing flow naturally.