Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription.
Two reasons.
1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book length).
2. CoPilot in Office would open me up to accusations of breach of contract—my book contracts warrant that they're all my own work: CoPilot brings that into question.
So good riddance to Office365!
A third reason for ditching Office365 is that I have had a hate on for Microsoft's monopolistic business practices since the early 1990s AND a fourth is that Office is enshittifying rapidly—autosave only works to OneDrive shares now, not local storage, for example—and why am I paying for shit I don't want to use anyway?
Now the alternative is confirmed good enough, I'm out.
The major security issues of the newest enshittified version of Microsoft Office 365 were quite enough.
It contains unwanted intrusive features like reduced feature online versions, Recall on an unsecured database, and spyware-by-another-name applications like Copilot & Teams.
Fewer applications (Publisher & Access no longer included)
Requires the uninstallation of other Microsift 32 bit applications (Visio & Project) in order to install the 64 bit versions.
Enough.
@cstross I can't recommend LibreOffice enough! It's intuitive, reliable, feature-rich and stable. Plus you can import or export in pretty much any document format in existence.
I have had compatibility issues in the past - a job application form which didn't work in LibreOffice because all the input fields were broken, for some inscrutable reason - but it's a rare enough occurrence to not be worth worrying about.
@Fabis_flying_fotos you got a totally different category of problem when you got large applications in excel.
@cstross Nothing like a rapidly expanding userbase to force devs to listen to negative feedback!
It seems to be a pattern with FOSS: if only 500 people are stubbornly using it despite its quirks, no improvement will happen. It's an exclusive little club.
But 5,000? 5 million? A growing dev team constantly bringing in fresh ideas, perspectives and skills? Now we're talking!
I suspect LibreOffice has also benefited from funding from various EU governments who are quite angry at the US tech industry.
@cstross OMG, I lost work recently bc i didn’t know that autosave being on meant NOTHING. Obviously the proprietary and confidential document belongs on our server, not the effing OneDrive.
And they want me to do my email in a flipping browser, like it’s 1995?! And don’t get me started on the batch of lame excuses that passes for “Teams”.
They’re just lying to us about their crappy products now. I have zero belief that they have actual engineers making decisions anymore. 🤬
I'm testing LO for highly formatted tech ebooks, and rocketing towards that same decision at ~.7C.
privacyguides.org can be a good resource for avoiding surveillance capitalism.
I could, in theory, benefit from LaTex for super-highly-formatted tech books.
But some POD printers don't work with the PDFs produced.
Which POD printers? No freaking clue. IngramSpark provides zero feedback or debugging. They just pull my book from distribution globally until I "fix the problem."
A book that was fine for years can get its first order in Malaysia, or Guam, and boom! Firmware that hasn't been updated since Clinton was president shuts me down worldwide. (Yes, B&N experimented with POD in the 90s and those machines are still in use. Fourth-hand.)
If it happens too often, Ingram will drop me entirely.
Not worth it.
@ingram @cstross @gemelen @mwl
Currently using Scribus to publish our local community magazine. Around 40 pages once a month. Output to PDF seems acceptable to my local print shop so far 👍 I can get an edition ready in about 2 days. It has python scripting which really helps with automating the ad placement. But we are off topic slightly here..
(Scribus is a page layout tool; more a replacement for Adobe InDesign than a word processing tool.)
@cstross @gemelen @mwl I am sorry to have to mention Asciidoc as it is imho the ‘exactly right’ middle ground between markdown (as it does have a formal syntax) and Latex (because it is actually easy to write and read back)
Cheers!
https://asciidoc.org/
https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/syntax-quick-reference/
https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoctor/latest/tooling/
@ignaziop1977 @gemelen @cstross
An author's ability to produce LaTeX is not the problem. https://mwl.io/faq#tools
@gemelen @mwl @cstross I use LyX most of the time, that's at an interesting intersection — text only with out-of-band markup like an office suite, but layout is done with LaTeX, and they will not predict hyphenation, line or page breaks and instead fit the text into the window.
Super useful because you can use a font size and window width that is convenient, there's no horizontal scrolling and it has no effect on the output.
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