Use LibreOffice
LibreOffice is as good as Word. Which sadly means there are still no really good document editors out there.
I used LibreOffice Writer for my coursework the past semester, and when I used my spouse’s Windows computer to double check the images were correctly placed before submitting a paper they were on completely different pages. This was when I saved it as a .docx, because the only two options accepted were .docx or pdf. I wound up doing everything as a pdf if I needed images, but I think LibreOffice doesn’t have a save as pdf option? Or if it did I missed it, I just used Google Docs to save it as a pdf.
IIRC you have to use the “Export as” option instead of the “Save as” for a .pdf file.
Good to know, at the time my brain was absolutely fried so it doesn’t surprise me that I missed it, lol
PDF is one of those weird “not for editing” formats, like STL. Hence why it’s often in an Export As dialog rather than a Save As.
It used to be even hackier. You’d have to get some separate PDF authoring software which would present to applications like a printer driver, so to create a PDF version of your document you’d start with the Print command, not Save or Export, then instead of your printer you’d select your PDF authoring software, then when you clicked Print it would create a file on your hard drive instead of hosing data down a parallel or USB cable to one of Satan’s Own Favorite Contraptions.
LibreOffice has a native export to PDF. And, if you use (almost) any Linux, you have a PDF printer included.
Even better, you can create a “Hybrid PDF” which embeds a second copy of the file in ODT format inside the PDF. This makes it re-editable.
Word supports ODT but it doesn’t support reading these ODT files embedded in PDFs though.
I am on Linux but haven’t needed to use office software in nearly 20 years, how do you access the pdf printer? Is that different from saving as a pdf through the menu?
Edit: thanks for the help everyone!
You literally ‘print’ to pdf. Instead of a physical page appearing from the demon box, it will give you a prompt of where to ‘print’ your file. Windows has it too, though I always use the pdf export and not the print. But in a pinch it’s good.
Submitting anything as an editable format like docx or odt is a bad idea. The moment a document is finished and I give it out of my hands, I turn it into an pdf.
Only Office > Libre Office
To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It’s like trying to “edit” the ingredients of a cake after it’s finished. You don’t edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It’s a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it’s possible to edit PDFs but of cause it’s a pain in the ass because that format doesn’t have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn’t understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It’s a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it’s a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it’s more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
Well yeah, because it’s not feasible to deconstruct a baked cake, not because “things that are made shouldn’t be edited”.
It’s also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn’t have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
Once you’ve tried VIM, you’ll never go back.
Mostly because you won’t be able to exit VIM.
I would use word for this, but I can’t close vim. I guess I’m learning LaTeX.
Last night, I was talking to my brother - who’s a mathematician by trade - and learned the following from him:
LaTeX is Leslie Lamport’s (hence La) macro package on top of TeX.
I’ve never used it, but for around fifteen years I’ve been working around people who do … And yet I never knew that.
I used it a lot for university… and I did not know that.
I did migrate to pandoc and markdown for a lot of stuff, with custom template files.
:q (my face in reaction to this)
Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
So many open source options out there that if you think MS word is the only options out there then you’re not looking hard enough.
Do you really think the multi billion dollar company I work for is going to switch?
You ain’t paying. Why do you care?
expecting word to edit pdfs is like expecting excel to edit compiled matlab programs
I think from an end-user perspective it’s realistic to expect Word to edit PDFs. It’s just that the PDF format is an unbelievably complex clusterfuck and thus requires an entirely separate and expensive program.
i mean, it’s equivalent to using a typewriter to edit a printed page. pdf was not designed to be edited.
What? If pdf wasn’t designed to be edited, why are there pdf editors?
because people who don’t know computers can’t learn to use the right file format.
pdf is a container format for code that is run by printers. it’s not something that can be easily changed. pdf editors are hacks upon hacks upon hacks.
Also I don’t see the problem with the other two.
Move image? Works fine if you select the right wrapping.
Ignore spelling mistake? Right click -> ignore once / ignore all / add to dictionaryThose without tech literacy love to blame the software.
A bad workman blames his tools after all.
LaTeX supremacy has entered that chat
Overfull hbox has left the chat un formatted
It’s basically an abysmal text editor combined with the worst page layout software the world has ever seen. Creating documents with it very much resembles masturbating with a blender.
The real miracle isn’t Word’s features, it’s how it’s still the default after decades of collective pain.
Same reason Windows is still the default on desktop: EEE and vendor-lock.
TGFM - Thank God for Markdown
Seriously, though. 9 times out of 10, markdown has all the formatting I need for the task at hand. On the rare occasion I need something more, I’m glad I have access to Apple Pages, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges.
My choice of file-format for documents sorted by complexity of the content:
- Markdown
- Orgmode
- Typst
People aren’t paying for Word, they’re paying for Excel and getting all the other goodies included.
Yeah, LibreOffice is fine for home use, maybe even really small businesses that don’t have to trade spread sheets with external customers, but Excel is the killer app.
Calc’s a fine spread sheet program, but it’s frustrating as hell after using Excel for 30+ years. You can’t trust that it will properly import an Excel sheet and it sure won’t do macros.
That’s fair. Imagine if people invested that much time into calc. A person can dream…
The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel’s file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you’ll forever be a second-rate Excel that’ll never quite be fully compatible.
I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I’m hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.
Microsoft Word is just fine. I assume most of the hate is for Microsoft because Word works just fine for most people’s use cases.
Carving animals on the wall of the cave is just fine. I assume most of the hate is for caves because carving animals on the wall works just fine for most ungabungas’ use cases.
I’m not sure which is worse, the fact that you thought this was clever and relevant or the fact that other people upvoted it and helped to validate your unbounded idiocy.
All the issues mentioned in the OP are longstanding issues with word. It’s not “just fine”. It’s really annoying.
PDF is not meant to be edited, it’s meant to be a digital representation of physical paper.
The other problems are just people who don’t actually learn to use Microsoft Word, you certainly can add more words to spellcheck and you can change how images and text interact, the only thing I can think of that caused issues is at one point they changed the default, too many people never learned how to change the layout and keep expecting the old behavior after the change.
These people don’t want to hear it. They’re obsessed with the cult of hating Microsoft. If they said, software should be libre/open source and LibreOffice is superior in that regard, I could take them seriously.
