"Word’s intellectual model is effectively timeless: you paint the text with its attributes. WordPerfect’s is active and progressive: you change a setting, continue typing, and then change some other setting"
Umm... those are the same basic model.
WordPerfect's model is simply more primitive markup. The only difference is, unlike a structural document editor, the markup isn't containers, they're just control directives. In essence you "paint" a region of text with a directive by changing a setting, then changing it back.
Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that traditionally worked like WordPerfect. The result is a complex mishmash of ad hoc and structural document markup, and you end up with confusing rules in order to reconcile the models.
Personally, I prefer LyX: powered by LaTeX, it's purely structural, while providing a rich editing environment with a visual approximation of the output, where the final document is typeset to the desired format. The result is simple and freeing: I concern myself with the content and the structure, let LyX manage the underlying markup, and let the typesetter decide how to lay it out.
> Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that traditionally worked like WordPerfect
In that regard, Pages is (was? didn't really use the new one) really awesome. Although it allows for arbitrary text settings to be applied percharacter, its UI actively encourages use of styles thanks to the now defunct drawer and various UI nudges and hints. As a consequence you were actively defining structure of your text, and intuitively understood that appearance is only applied as a side effect. Combined with styles being assigned F1-F12 shortcut keys and you had a wonderful piece of software that allowed my then-student girlfriend to type lectures and have them structured and typeset properly on the fly. It really highlights how the whole style-thing management in Word is absolutely horrendous.
Consider the layout that he applied to the citation sentence, where Word waves a magic wand and leaves some of them italic and some not. The simplicity of WordPerfect and LyX does not do that.
The underlying problem is that Word tries to be smart and tries to guess what you are trying to achieve. He argues that most of the times it is wrong. But even if it were right some of the time, it's very annoying when wrong, very hard to correct, and indistinguishable from magic.
And I don't want to have some unpredictable tool run on the text that I painstakingly created.
His comparison though, and the similarity to how WordPerfect managed things, is precisely why I switched to LyX as well. It's not perfect, but it's a huge step better at getting out of my way and just letting me tell the computer what I want to do, and letting it figure it out from there. I get to "just write," and in the end I still get something that honestly looks more professional than the things I did in Word and LibreOffice, with a fraction of the work and far less fighting the model.
Umm... those are the same basic model.
WordPerfect's model is simply more primitive markup. The only difference is, unlike a structural document editor, the markup isn't containers, they're just control directives. In essence you "paint" a region of text with a directive by changing a setting, then changing it back.
Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that traditionally worked like WordPerfect. The result is a complex mishmash of ad hoc and structural document markup, and you end up with confusing rules in order to reconcile the models.
Personally, I prefer LyX: powered by LaTeX, it's purely structural, while providing a rich editing environment with a visual approximation of the output, where the final document is typeset to the desired format. The result is simple and freeing: I concern myself with the content and the structure, let LyX manage the underlying markup, and let the typesetter decide how to lay it out.