this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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-23
The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed the way we use language (www.bbc.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed the way we use language::As Microsoft Word turns 40, we look at the role the software has played in four decades of language and communication evolution.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It revolutionised typeset-quality printing

Microsoft Word!? ๐Ÿ˜‚ You have got to be fucking joking!

I think you mean TeX, troff, or even InDesign, but definitely not Microsoft fucking Word.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

troff

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Worked for a small printing house for a while back when laser printers were new. We had two Apple LaserWriters that we would proof on before submitting to the big Linotronic machine. We would accept TeX, troff, PageMaker documents and print them โ€” theses, specialist text books, self-published books. Every time we got a WordStar or MS Word document, it was given to me to convert into TeX; we had two old UNIX guys that would go through and check troff documents for correctness, so I picked up a bit of troff there. Good times.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Or the other commercial/pro page layout apps (Pagemaker, etc) that were already in use before MS acquired Word (I was using Word called by another name before MS acquired it.)

Then there's the page layout systems used by print orgs back in the 80's.

Having worked in/with numerous very large organizations (think 10,000 employees+), I've never seen this "repository of templates". There were some templates, for maybe corporate stuff, and a handful here-and-there for maybe business-unit-level stuff, and they were as grammatically flawed as any other documents (which drives me bonkers).

What Word standardized was people's misunderstanding of page layout (which word doesn't do), thinking this was the same as document generation.