After all, while the standard WYSIWYG editors usually allow for the insertion of Greek letters and rudimentary equations, in more likelihood, you’d probably find yourself doing a lot of clicking and hand-and-eye coordination - often with very little in return… Try to do this in Microsoft Word, and you’ll soon find yourself in deep despair and fury.
And even if a paragraph is fully-justified, there is usually a lack of consistency in the interword spaces - which in turn could make the document look even messier than usual.Īnd if you want to produce elaborated formulas and equations in its full glory, you are pretty much out of luck. With the traditional WYSIWYG word processors, the end of the lines are - more often than not - poorly aligned. For one, the texts in these editors tend to be typeset in low resolution, with usually little to no care on minute ornamentations (e.g., ligature) and spacing/alignment details (e.g., hyphenation) that are commonly observed in professionally produced journals and printed books. While traditional WYSIWYG editors provide an enormous amount of choices in terms of fonts, font sizes and colors, documents produced using those editors tend to lack the typographical machineries to make them visually pleasing and satisfying. The problem - if there is one - is that they invariably suffer from the typical weaknesses exhibited by a standard WYSIWYG word processor, such as the limitations when it comes to feature extension, and the general clumsiness of the design interface.
How much does a proper Microsoft Word ® costs? Well, here a picture is worth a thousand words: Or if you prefer subscription plans for Office 365, which seems at least a bit cheaper on the surface: As powerful as word processors are, the proprietariness of document preparation applications, while many times justifiable, can hinder the democratization of the publication of creative and scholarly work - a right previously reserved to the elites, and often associated with the publishing industry even decades ago.Īnd of course, there are also the free / open-source variants of Microsoft Word such as, LibreOffice, NeoOffice (for Mac OS X) or even Google Docs.
In fact, there have been many recurring episodes of file conversion disasters in the history of Microsoft Word (in the olden days at least).
This would then require another round of judicious manual correction on your own, which could very well be somewhat painful or infuriating. In addition to being text-unfriendly, converting these filetypes to other formats - or even just older formats - could very well jeopardize the formatting, alignment, or other specifications in the document. Try opening these files with basic text editors such as NotePad (or TextEdit in Mac) and see what happens: you’d probably get a bunch of weird and unintelligible symbols that just make no sense! In other words, opening a Microsoft Word file requires a Microsoft-Word-like application. Quick question: How do we open a doc/docx file? With Microsoft Word of course! (or a variant that accepts these filetypes). These range from the ones that may have been annoying you in the past - to the subtler ones that you might not even have been aware of.
6 Serious Weaknesses of Standard WYSIWYG EditorsĮver heard of a software application called Microsoft Word? Of course you do! And chances are, you have been using it - or another What You See Is What You Get ( WYSIWYG) word processor (e.g., Writer, Google Docs) - all along over these years.Īnd here is something potentially unpleasant to the ears: what if we were to object that sometimes, they could just be the poor tools designed with the wrong philosophy in mind? Or that they are built primarily for general usage, and is thus ill-suited for technical publishing at a wider scale?Īnd while these text editors are undoubtedly highly powerful and accessible, there are also 6 critical flaws that they tend to suffer from.
Industrial-Grade Professional Typesetting.Flowery / Messy Graphics Over Image Quality, Speed and Simplicity.Unsophisticated Typography and Alignment.6 Serious Weaknesses of Standard WYSIWYG Editors.