Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

I have to draft a lot of documents that require a lot of formatting, and the automatic (unwanted) formatting changes are just a constant fucking nightmare. Also I have had situations where there's a strict page limit on a document and then suddenly at the last minute I email it to someone and it's two pages longer for them than it is for me and we can't figure out why.

I've tried all the advice about setting up styles and stuff, doesn't help. Best thing is the format painter, but even that gets undone all the time. Clearly if I want to change the spacing on paragraph 135 that also means I want to restart the numbering in the next paragraph, change the margins and spacing and put it in a different typeface. That totally makes sense.

i've had to use Powerpoint a ton this year because i'm temporarily filling in for another professor, who's very generously shared her notes and slides. i normally do all this stuff in InDesign and... GAH, the number of basic layout and lining-stuff-up tasks that are just needlessly janky and clunky.

Word is basically like "Hey, wouldn't it be FUN if we suddenly switched to blue comic sans for the next paragraph of your summary judgment brief? Change it up a bit!"

oh yeah i love when it spontaneously makes one paragraph calibri

or when the numbers are 11 pt and the rest of the document is 12. and why not make just one numbered paragraph indented .19 inches and one .23 inches. do you want to backspace and move one sentence into another paragraph? let's un-number the entire paragraph IF you can backspace at all. and don't bother trying to paste it in because you are now the world of in .23 inch indents. it's the best.

otm

It's sort of the word processing equivalent of when google started doing those AI images and it was like "here's a very powerful computer's extremely fucked up and trippy interpretation of what a dog looks like based on a bunch of pictures of dogs," except with documents.

Over time my career has evolved such that I spend less and less time with MS Word. Beginning to think this is not entirely coincidental?

On the bad side, it means that several versions have come out since I was a power user, and when I do have to use it I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to find shit where it hasn’t been since 2015.

Those of us who are professional experts in using Office products secretly chuckle in glee when you normals are frustrated. That is what provides us with job security.

It's like, if Pagemaker, Quark XPress, Illustrator, and Photoshop had been totally grokkable by the layperson, I'd have been out of a job in 1998.

Makes me feel like a buggy-whip maker or 1980s typesetter or Linotype operator. Just hoping I can retire before you folks realize that you don't need me.

a lot of older lawyers used wordperfect until they couldn't anymore but that one i could never figure out

oh lawdy, mention WordPerfect 5.1 in some circles and people have quasi-sexual opinions about its elegance

... inordinate amount of time trying to find shit where it hasn’t been since 2015.

Just ask Clippy the helpful paperclip

There was a time when I was paid to teach "Word Tips and Tricks." It didn't take me long to realize I was using shortcuts and workarounds I'd memorized in circa 1998. The software had long since caught up (at least in those specific ways).

At least three times, my "students" gently pointed out things that should have been obvious, but that I - the alleged instructor - didn't know about. Purely because I was so used to the kludgey workaround I'd gotten used to a decade earlier.

Oh wow yeah, Wordperfect 5.1 was what we were taught to use in my first year of university and I did all my typed coursework on. Anyway, it seemed to work fine but I did jump at the first chance to go wysiwg.

lol I loved WordPerfect in high school, but it would appear alien as fuck to me nowadays.

I know this ain't the point of the thread but I'm truly astonished by A) how much you can do in Excel these days and B) how easy it is to Google instructions for it.

Excel once led a successful sting operation for underage drinking, all I had to do was push Function F9

i love how one of the most useful tools in Word --- its ability to chew on a whole spreadsheet and spit out the data however you want to format it (for example to generate report cards for a class), is buried in a feature called "Mailings," and a parade of arcane jargon. step one, click on the thing that says "Start Mailer Merge," even though nothing about that sounds like "import a spreadsheet." and of course, all the formatting has to be a ropey trial-and-error process of clicking back and forth between the master sheet and the "preview" mode. i only learned of this whole thing's existence this year!

Microsoft Paint still after all these years not being able to do transparent backgrounds. Fuck a Photoshop.

Still don't know why the easiest way to save a doc as a PDF is by pretending like you're going to print it first.

lol otm

Because printing is the point where Word stops its bullshit and fucking around and has to actually draw what is on the page properly instead of a billion field codes and hidden whatevers, and then at that point the printing system swoops in and takes a sip of that pure page layout to write a PDF file (which is basically a wrapped and packaged version of the PostScript page description needed by the printer). In older versions of Word there was an option to save as "Microsoft PDF" which was a horribly damaged version with weird graphics etc., but now I think it just accepts reality and calls on the print infrastructure same as the user doing a "print ... NO! PDF!" fake-out.

^ booming post, presumably

I used to work in pre-press, we had to find ways to get proper layouts out of stupid software which had an internal document model unchanged from QuickDraw 0.8 in 1983 ... *shudders*

amazing explanation, thank you! one of those little things i've done for ages, but never got around to asking why it was. now feel like i know more about PDFs and DOCs both. are the "billion field codes" the reason doc/docx files are kind of enormous for not actually containing all that much text? i mean obviously the kilobytes a "hello world" DOC takes up about here are nothing in present-day terms, but i imagine they still represent something that might appear inelegant by that old-school metric. but i guess worrying about said metrc has long since passed out of the elegant/inelegant universe into genuine obsolescence.

It's like, if Pagemaker, Quark XPress, Illustrator, and Photoshop had been totally grokkable by the layperson

Quark is the most grokkable of the four – and there's so much less room for "what weird shit has happened now" surprises like Word. But the £1000 price and absolute user-hostility of the company would have doomed them on that front anyway.

The first versions of Pages (right up until the shitty iOS port to Mac) were actually a lot more Quark-like; I loved those.

So much of my Photoshop/Illustrator knowledge is like 25 years old. I don't use them as much anymore so there are entire new features and tools that do things much simpler but I have no idea they're there.

I also still have a moment of sheer terror when dragging the guides off screen because the Windows NT version of Photoshop 5 that I had at my job in 1997 would crash if I did this.

there's a prepress thread if anybody has any questions about InDesign/Illustrator, printing, color management etc. Happy to talk about that forever.

some ILX lore...onetime poster/music writer Geeta told me she was good friends with the head of Quark's daughter or something and they were driving in a car and he was like "we're not going to update Quark to be compatible with OSX, the mac is a dead end" and they were like "you crazy".

That may not be totally accurate, but Quark did take their time with that update and lost users to InDesign. Of course that wasn't the only reason they'd lose users to InDesign, nor the last.

That's a great story; I can believe it too — Quark was business-school case-study inept in so many ways, almost Commodore-level bad. iirc they fired their entire dev department after 3.1, outsourced everything and the resulting 4.0/Dispatch 2 was so bad it nearly bankrupted them. Then Adobe spent years limbering up InDesign and Quark still didn't have anything ready to stop it.

Quark: We're still "Qool" with a Q.

We’ve been pioneers in desktop publishing, digital publishing and content automation since 1981. Today, customers rely on us for closed-loop content lifecycle management so they can meet their desired goals – whether that’s entertaining subscribers with a digital magazine, educating employees through standard operating procedures, or furnishing regulators with documents to demonstrate compliance. Quark. Brilliant content that works.

I knew people who loved quark but it refused to work on the networked system 7 lab at school so everyone ended up using pagemaker. To this day I've never actually used it.

I have a whole rant about this and should probably not inflict it on yall

But I probably will

I learned Quark before InDesign; in fact, I'm sure I still have some Quark layouts of the first couple of issues of the Burning Ambulance print zine that I can no longer open or do anything with.

Markzware probably has a tool for that.

Quark 3.32 was killer. People were still stuck in that years later. 4 was buggy but by 6.5 it was still more or less the dominant program. But by 7 it was over. InDesign just kept adding features and quark lagged. I remember revolutions like dragging and dropping images from the desktop and being able to handle transparency.

are the "billion field codes" the reason doc/docx files are kind of enormous for not actually containing all that much text?

Nobody expects the full page imposition

My way of extracting mages from word or PowerPoint was always to export as a website. Then you get all the images in an images folder.

That regardless of the casting or script talent in a given blockbuster movie, the having ordered several hundred million worth of special effects three years in advance will see the last two thirds occur without reference to plot, pacing or indeed visibility

Yeah ive just watched a marvel movie

woaaaaaaaaaaaaah that zip file secret, that's cool, thank you!

^

things I was shockingly old when I learned

another great "extract images" trick is an application called The Unarchiver on macOS - if you drop a PDF on it, it makes a folder with all the bitmap images pulled out in their native resolution

damn matt

tools of the trade, I teach using figures from articles etc so I picked up a lot over the years!

Speaking of Q products. Quantel Paintbox, still ain't seen anything on modern computers that comes close to the simplistic and smooth performance that machine brought to digital painting. Fed up of drowning in a sea of icons on paint software these days.

Oh that’s old. My first post college job was at a service bureau that had quantel paintbox and flame suites. That was a different era for sure. A leather couch so the client can watch the work on a big screen. We also had Iris inkjet proofers. Silicon graphics RIPs, scitex prepress systems etc.

The whole notion of OPI seems so quaint. “Those 6mb TIFFs were just too large for any mortal Mac so we had to use JPEG stand-ins and swap them out at the RIP”

Oh yeah. Xinet. It was funny going through those transitions. At some point I started a job where we’d release files with all low res in place and send a dvd of the hires to the vendor and they’d do the swapping. I was the genius who was like you know we have the means to place hires ourselves and release press ready files, which is good because we have more control, assuming the production artists know what they are doing. Suddenly I was like ok we need to buy new computers for everybody because these aren’t cutting it.

I remember when Mac RIP software became available, we had a Power Computing Mac clone with about 90MB of RAM driving the image setter. It was working so hard it could only manage to spit out a line of text every few minutes. Often it took us 15-20 minutes to realise if it had crashed.