Alternative to Microsoft Word and Google Docs

[benstigsen]

One the most essential software being used in a wide field of areas, is something to write documents.

Microsoft Word and Google Docs are most commonly used for this purpose, but they are not private, small or fast.
While alternatives like LibreOffice and OpenOffice exist, they are replicating not only functionality from Word and Docs, but even using the same style of UI.

There's a big opportunity to create something simpler, faster, smaller, private and perhaps something with different functionality and a different design.

[bvisness]

Let's talk about that "different design", because in my opinion word processors are not a great design.

I've heard it observed that word processors are bad at editing words. They're more like...character processors. They're designed for casual typography, but typically only do so in a very narrow sense that doesn't take the document structure into account. For example, even if you use preset Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. styles, you're very likely to screw up the paragraph spacing on something down the line, and everything will look bad.

Word processors are kind of the worst of old WYSIWYG, where 50% of the characters are invisible control characters that ruin your formatting for reasons unknown. I don't think this is desirable.

This topic has actually been explored in last year's jam, by a team led by Samuel Deboni. The submission was fantastic, so I really think you all should look into it! Here's their submission, and here's their slot on our recap stream. They built a file format and an editor where the smallest unit is a word, not a letter, and the document structure is actually explicit. This allows them to make the editing experience much more pleasant, and to allow large document edits without screwing up formatting.

If anyone plans to work on this for the jam, I think it would be worth reaching out to Samuel first. He's @ leumas on the Discord.

[eternalStudent]

I'm fond of the relative simplicity of LyX. I'm using it even when writing non-scientific documents, because for me it is much easier to use than Word. It solves that problem of formatting and it compiles to beautiful pdf files. I would love a document editor that steals some design ideas from LyX, and can also be compiled to a single HTML file per document.

[Pere001]

Some random things I'd like to see in a text editor:

• Text style id's instead of changing style parameters (font, bold, italic, color...) every time. If you select some text you could assign it one style id, and then set the style parameters for that style id. You could also still change style parameters immediately like in normal text editors.
• Multiple dockable panels/windows like in debuggers and code editors. Allow having two views of the same text at once, so for example you could have a secondary view showing the end of the text to quickly edit the bibliography, or have a zoomed out view of the text.
• The "explicit tree-like structure" of the text like in the "Scroll" text editor from the Wheel Reinvention Jam also seems like a good idea for automatically formatting the headings, quickly reordering the sections and quickly jumping to the different sections.
• Part of me wants an editor with the ability to insert invisible text, like code comments, or make invisible sections just for the structure in the editor. But that might mean you'd have a "raw data" view (with comments) and a "final formatted" view, and I think that complexity is just not worth it in most use cases. But if there was a way to add some kind of this functionality without it getting in the way or getting out of hand, it might be cool to explore it. For example, if you did the "explicit tree-like structure" thing, then you could assign comments to each node, and those would be shown in the tree view, and they could also be optionally shown on the left of the text editor, outside the page.