If Excel rules the world, Word rules the legal profession. Jordan Bryan published a great article explaining why this is the case, and why this is unlikely to change any time soon, no matter how many people from the technology world think they can change this reality.
Microsoft Word can never be replaced. OpenAI could build superintelligence surpassing human cognition in every conceivable dimension, rendering all human labor obsolete, and Microsoft Word will survive. Future contracts defining the land rights to distant galaxies will undoubtedly be drafted in Microsoft Word.
Microsoft Word is immortal.
↫ Jordan Bryan at The Redline by Version Story
Bryan cites two main reasons underpinning Microsoft Word’s immortality in the legal profession. First, lawyers need the various formatting options Word provides, and alternatives often suggested by outsiders, like Markdown, don’t come close to offering even 5% of the various formatting features lawyers and other writers of legal documents require. By the time you add all those features back to Markdown, you’ve recreated Word, but infinitely worse and more obtuse. Also, and this is entirely my personal opinion, Markdown sucks.
Second, and this one you’ve surely heard before: Word’s .docx format is effectively a network protocol. Everyone in the legal profession uses it, can read it, work with it, mark it up, apply corrections, and so on – from judges to lawyers to clients. If you try to work with, say, Google Docs, instead, you create a ton of friction in every interaction you have with other people in the legal profession. I vividly remember this from my 15 years as a translator – every single document you ever worked with was a Microsoft Office document. Sure, the translation agency standing between the end client and the translator might have abstracted the document into a computer-aided translation tool like Trados, but you’re still working with .docx, and the translated document sent to the client is still .docx, and needs to look identical to the source, just in a different language.
In the technology world, there’s a lot of people who come barging into some other profession or field, claiming to know everything, and suggest to “just do x”, without any deference to how said profession or field actually operates. “Just use Markdown and git” even if the people involved have no clue what a markup language even is let alone what git is; “just use LibreOffice” even if the people involved will skewer you for altering the formatting of a document even ever so slightly; we all know examples of this.
An industry tends to work a certain way not because they’re stupid or haven’t seen the light – it tends to work that way because there’s a thousand little reasons you’re not aware of that make that way the best way.
Well this is stupid. Both sides are yammering on about Markdown while not knowing that LaTeX exists for the reason of machine-readable version-controllable typesetting, and that there are eleventy gorillion tools for converting Markdown to LaTeX, to the point that naming any of them will provoke a “why didn’t you mention my favorite?” reply. As for not being able to dislodge it, the US government (or the EU, which has a vested interest in dislodging Microsoft monopolies) could require the use of LaTeX/PDF for typesetting court filings and tell everyone else to get fucked. As for lawyers building all their tooling around DOCX? Well, they’ve extracted so much money from the rest of society over the years that they can just nut up and shell out to replace all their tools.
runciblebatleth,
I wish Latex was more accessible, but outside of academics, I have rarely seen people use it. It is essentially a niche “operating system” written by one of the most brilliant minds of our time.
And… as much as the old DOC was a terrible format (essentially a binary serialization of COM objects), the newer docx is much more open. They even made it an international standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
That gives a lot of assurance to the public sector, which would be “computer illiterate” to use Latex.
(and let’s be honest, outside of README files, markdown is not very useful. maybe with pandoc it gets better)
Microsoft is not very honest when it comes to Office Open XML. They use it in such way that they can still claim that they follow the standard but users of other office suites still struggle. I remember reading about it somewhere, maybe here in osnews?
A cousin of mine runs a small business and decided to migrate from Office to LibreOffice and now she is considering migrating back because often Word documents don’t format properly or, when she sends documents out, the receipient complains that the documents don’t render well.
OOXML is the old binary office formats with every field given a meaningless name and dumped into XML.
The standard is pretty much useless in covering all the edges and rough edges of OOXML (as where the specs for the old binary office that Microsoft released to avoid antitrust attention), the Libreoffice are reverse engineering Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint as they’ve been doing since forever.
I just wished they did it faster, how can the Chinese be so good at it with WPS office?
kurkosdr,
I’d say it is not the Chinese speed vs open source that makes WPS more compatible with OOXML than OpenOffice, but…
It is their architectural differences.
For OpenOffice, OOXML is a “foreign” format. They have their own ODL (?) files as their in memory model. If you open a Word DOCX, it has to go through translation (and then back)
WPS? They are more of “build around Office structures”. They even blatantly copy the UI (not entirely, but much more then OpenOffice).
If you are looking for a free and open source solution, I think “Only Office” (stylized ONLYOFFICE for some reason) https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE would be a better choice.
(I have entirely missed them. I just found about it while researching ooxml compability).
They seem to have AI of course, but ignore that if you want.
Yes, I’ve made a similar complaint on Slashdot once. My complaint is that the LibreOffice bros and gals won’t make the internals of Writer more OOXML-friendly by expanding their in-memory model (originally made to serve just ODT) to cover the edge cases of OOXML.
kurkosdr,
I agree. Pragmatism should have won over purity
As it happens, LaTeX has a small fan following in the English bar, to the extent that Paul Stanley KC – one of the very top barristers in England – has written a style for Biblatex and Biber to produce citations in the correct format for court. But yes, it’s very unlikely that solicitors or transactional lawyers will move to use LaTeX for drafting contracts or other legal documents.
LaTeX is shit in regard of the insane toolchain to setup before getting anything remotely compilable into… what… PDF ? I tried to set such a complete, ready-to-use toolchain on Windows (https://github.com/wenuam/wm_app_doc_gen_latex), As Thom states, ” By the time you add all those features back to LaTeX, you’ve recreated Word, but infinitely worse and more obtuse”.
Don’t get me wrong, Miktex is great, but imagine providing your clients with the right release, upgrade, sty files, etc so that they can display your LaTeX, not even editing it, having knowledge of the inner working of macros, preamble, etc ? Word is Wysiwyg, not LaTeX, regardless of any pseudo “real time” editor like Texmaker or TeXstudio.
*IF* LaTeX was to succeed, the experience for the user should really be better seamlessly integrated, having to share around only ONE file with everything in it (a “container”) like… DOC, ODT, PDF files. Not a TEX file with all its dependencies and media in independent files scattered around. The conception of LaTeX makes it unsuccessful beside a few domains and nerds.
Even https://sile-typesetter.org/ isn’t any better in that regard. So before anyone else get it “right”, as stated :
Microsoft Word is immortal.
Kochise,
I have used Latex a lot in academia. However, yes, setup was always difficult.
We usually went with TexNicCenter: https://www.texniccenter.org/
Not WSWYWIG, but more like “Visual Sudio 6.0 for LaTex”. Highly integrated including PDF previews
Add in a good version control (SVN back then, Git today), it becomes very easy to use. I think we could also just share a ZIP containing a “portable” distribution of everything. It just worked.
But, would I do this today? Much less likely.
“it becomes very easy to use”
For a coder, yes. For a secretary, no.
Well.. even not for most average coders… But, I see your point.
It doesn’t make sense to use Latex to write a letter but it could make sense to use it to write a book. I have seen very cool templates to things like rpg books.
LaTeX is supposed to fit every purpose, including a simple letter. Otherwise Wordpad for that matter would be way enough (I do use XP’s Wordpad to edit simple letters in RTF format).
https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/letter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuK7k3rtw6E
The problem with LaTeX is that it doesn’t have a good graphical tool that users can use as they do with Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer (does LaTeX even have such a “standard” graphical tool?). In plain English, LaTeX is your canonical example of AcademiaWare, omnipotent and theoretically capable of anything and everything, but useless outside a circle of technocrats who can actually make use of it.
Markdown has the above problem (lack of a good graphical editor) plus the problem it has no concept of page sizes and page margins (see my other comment below why this is an issue).
kurkosdr,
The closest you’d get is: LYX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX
I’ve used it in the past, it is a “WYSIWYM” editor. So not exactly what you get in final output, but preserves the meaning.
But went back to ordinary LaTeX toolchain (mostly TexNicCenter which works better as an “IDE” — see above)
Did you try Bakoma Tex?
Bakoma is a “dead” end, so to speak : https://bakoma-tex.daniel-aldrich.ca/
jgfenix,
Unfortunately never heard of it.
Kochise,
That was a real twist. Sorry to hear that.
I thought Wordperfect ruled the legal world.
I was going to say the same thing. Incidentally, WordPerfect’s advanced grammar check was instrumental in developing my writing abilities because my public school education barely taught me any grammar at all.
Yeah, if this article were written in 2000 it would have been making exactly the same case for WordPerfect. We all know how that turned out.
Empires rise, and empires fall.
I’m just about old enough to remember the stanglehold Lotus and 123 once held. Now that’s been sold for parts to an Indian private equity.
At some point Office and office 365 will lose their allure. The issue for the competition is they don’t only need to prise you away from Word, but the entire office suite. No one is going to ditch Word for Google Docs but still pay the licence for Excel.
Right now I don’t see viable competion. STAR/Open/LibreOffice have been good but always playing catchup on the desktop. Now, in the world of browser based, they have lost already. Google is missing all but the most rudimentary features and upstarts like Proton are focusing on a specific market.
Time will tell, but we need some new startup or Adobe to make Acrobat/PDF the centre of the new world for this particular empire crumbles
As a heavy user of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Word since it was for DOS after migrating from WordStar, I have found that Google Docs does 90~95% of anything I need from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and with a much, much better online experience, and a much much cleaner web interface.
And then, there are those heavy users of Word and Excel who are also heavy haters of ppt, who want the damn thing run on their own computer.
For me it does about 50%, depending on what I’m doing, and I’m being generous. Every time something simple I want isn’t possible it reminds me how Google basically abandoned the product. For example, Search is completely broken. Searching a large document hangs the browser after typing the first letter because it finds 1000s of instances. Want to search for a whole word only? Use RegEx (and don’t get me started on checking the “regex” checkbox _before_ entering your expression as your tab will be dead.
Something as simple as defining your own styles? Na-ah. Define the space between paragraphs (except for a binary on-off)? Na-ah. And I could go on for hours. It’s an incredibly botched product. Google Sheets is somewhat better, though I’m not an Excel power user so perhaps it’s just as botched, I don’t know.
Yes, Google Docs is fantastic. I use Google Sheets for 100% of my spreadsheeting these days. I dread the day that the inevitable Google enshittification kicks in, but so far so good. Hopefully there are useful alternatives by then that have something similar to the =IMPORT* functions and currency conversion with up-to-date rates.
I have definitely read this article before, about 20 years ago. Except it was WordPerfect in the title.
The ‘article’ is essentially an advertisement for his company’s product.
He’s not wrong about the strength of Word in the legal sector, but really, how many tech people working with/for legal entities are actually advocating using Git and Markdown for collaborative and iterative legal documents?
Seems to me like he’s taken a handful of driveby comments on Twitter to use for his rebuttal/advertisement.
Of course “Word” is immortal. All vampires are.
People who promote Markdown as an alternative to DOCX or ODT don’t know what they are talking about: Markdown has no concept of page sizes and printer margins, so when you try to print it (or export it as an A4-size or Letter-size PDF), your document will be clamped into pages in a manner you can’t control (with page breaks introduced at the most inopportune places). Same for using HTML. Also, no support for per-page footers and headers, because again, you need something that understands the concept of pages for that to work.
Telling users of Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer to use Markdown or HTML would be as dumb as telling people who use Photoshop to create printable artwork to use GIMP, despite the fact GIMP has no concept of CMYK and your RGB colors will be uncontrollably stretched and/or clipped when converted to the CMYK colorspace… oh yeah, that’s something some people also do.
kurkosdr,
…and visa versa too. Very frequently I get DOCX and PDF for content that should be continuous and it’s such a pain to deal with these formats because the formats try to interject page breaks where they don’t belong. Word processors make editing and creation easy and PDFs make archiving easy, so we all use them. I often copy rich text into documents and “print” PDF files for archival. For example I may want a copy of the original manufacturer or ebay listing. And yet I’m constantly being bitten by PDFs and DOCX pagination features producing a bad faith representation of the source content. I want the format to record the source as it was!!! These pagination gripes go in both directions.
FYI if you just want to paste rich text into LibreOffice and don’t want pagination, you can set a custom page size with a height and width of 3×3 meters in LibreOffice and not have to worry about pagination for reasonable content and reasonable font sizes:
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/does-libre-writer-have-a-maximum-page-size-limit/5306
And apparently in latest versions it’s up to 6×6 meters, but I haven’t been able to source this properly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLXnUMZXTYI
For “print to PDF”, it depends what sizes the virtual printer supports, so find a virtual printer that fits your needs.
About the other gripe, when the author wants their content to be paginated, they want it paginated, your opinion about whether it “should be” continuous is irrelevant. This is especially relevant in legal professions where unfortunate pagination introduced by the browser’s print functionality can have legal consequences.
kurkosdr,
Thank you for the suggestion.
I tried copying content from the web to a wide & tall page, Although it’s quite apparent that the CSS styles in HTML still don’t play well in LibreOffice. A lot of editing still seems necessary to get desired results. Mind you I already do this anyway and it’s not a problem that arises out of your suggestion, rather it’s a separate gripe with pasting into LibreOffice. I’ll play around with it some more.
For some reason chrome and FF don’t let users print custom page sizes, so I don’t know how to use your trick to improve the layout situation with PDF. This is too bad because PDFs are so easy to create through the browser.
By using the screen shot button on web dev tools I can get a pixel perfect representation as PNG, although it takes more steps than to generate a PDF, is a highly inefficient format for archiving web text & photos, long pages are truncated, and copying/pasting text from a PNG doesn’t work obviously.
It’s not irrelevant though. Rather than call each other’s gripes irrelevant I think it would be more reasonable to agree to the fact that people have different needs at different times and some tools serve those needs better than others.
You will never get perfect conversion from HTML+CSS+JS to LibreOffice Writer (or even just HTML+CSS, or even just HTML), the markup formats are different.
In fact, my gripe is exactly in the opposite direction: Word and Writer allow scripting and animation for what is a printable format. They shouldn’t. Even PowerPoint and Impress should only allow the kind of animation that can be converted to print without losing information.
My idea is to ignore the “print to PDF” functionality of the browser entirely and install a virtual PDF printer, just like we did back in the IE 5.5 and Netscape days when the browser didn’t have any kind of “print to PDF” functionality. Then you can adjust the page size of your virtual PDF printer. No clue where you can find such a tool nowadays, it’s a dead market since forever. Another solution is to just choose the largest page size your browser’s “print to PDF” functionality allows, which is not ideal but better than the A4 or Letter default.
kurkosdr,
I agree with this. I don’t think I’ve come across word documents with scripting or animations in the wild though. Scripting is more useful with excel, but that has a lot of caveats like not being portable and microsoft making it harder to use. One of the companies I work for has an excel automation component and customers regularly have support tickets over microsoft having broken things. I get microsoft’s security rationale, but they are making legit use cases harder for their users.
It’s so nice to have native PDF output, I never liked having to mess with printer drivers and would find that regressive personally. Nevertheless the FF print dialog box does not seem to change the page size dialog to reflect the page size of the physical printer and those options seem to be hard coded. A custom version of the browser might be necessary to output a non-standard page size.
I still think the best approach would have been for PDFs to support non-paginated operation. But since that didn’t happen, I’ve ended up with thousands of PDFs that are improperly paginated. Oh well, such is life.
Alfman:
At least on Linux it’s possible with Firefox and the GTK print dialog. I just printed this thread to a custom-sized single-page PDF with:
– Hamburger menu > Print
– All the way at the bottom of the Firefox print dialog there is as a link “Print using the system dialog…”
– That opens the GTK print dialog, which in turn has a “Print to file” option
– In the “Page Setup” tab there is a paper size setting, and all the way at the bottom of a stupidly long list of irrelevant sizes there is a “Manage custom sizes” option that let me add a paper size of 12×250 inches for this test.
And I just checked Chromium, and it also has a “Print using system dialog” option.
rahim123,
I tested and confirm those steps work. It’s a bit cumbersome, especially if you have a lot of documents and end up needing to resort to trial and error to get the page size right. Alternatively you just keep an oversized page and ignore all the excess whitespace – a bit ugly but maybe good enough.
I found that 200 inches works, but somewhere between 200 and 500 inches it pops up a dialog box reporting a print error after which I can no longer print anything else without restarting FF.
kurkosdr,
My edit didn’t make the edit window…
IMHO PDF would be a significantly better choice then. Editable doc formats are inherently unstable for perfect pagination because even a single litter change can & will trigger a re-pagination. Or even a slight change in font rendering & kerning can cause cascading changes. All bets are off if you don’t have the same fonts. To the extent that a document is no longer allowed to be changed, then the source for that document doesn’t matter, the PDF format retains the boundaries even if it was printed from HTML.
I certainly don’t get reliable pagination converting to/from libreoffice, but I’d be curious if somebody’s analyzed MS office documents from the 90s through today for pixel perfect accuracy. We talk about it as though it’s the gold standard, but is there anything from MS that specifically says it’s a guarantee or is everyone just making assumptions? I am genuinely curious.
PDF is the paginated format of choice when the document doesn’t have to be editable (other than editable fields inside the document, which PDF can do).
However, DOC, DOCX, and ODT cover the following edge cases:
– People who want to make a paginated document with editable fields but don’t know how to do it in PDF (yes, I know using DOC, DOCX, or ODT has the risk of people changing things outside the editable fields or even enlarging the fields to make typing easier and eventually breaking the layout, but it’s a common thing regardless)
– People exchanging a paginated document as a collaborative effort. This is the biggest use case of DOC and DOCX (and to a degree, ODT). Every person makes their change and also makes sure pagination remains good before sending it to the next person. This is where the “insert page break” and “keep with next (paragraph)” functionalities of modern word processors shine, but most people don’t know how to use them and you have to teach them. But my point is, the document has to be paginated, and pagination evolves with the document and isn’t inserted at the last minute (which would require a second round of edits at the end, when nobody has time for such things)
As an aside, even DOC and DOCX files traded via e-mail or Dropbox are slowly becoming obsolete in favour of SharePoint and OneDrive, and I don’t know what the Document Foundation’s alternative to SharePoint and OneDrive is (aka something that seamlessly integrates with the “Save As” functionality of LibreOffice Writer). Google Docs has the opposite problem, they have the online service but their editor is online-only and barebones. So, even if LibreOffice Writer gets perfect DOC and DOCX support (something which would have been adequate back in 2010), Microsoft Office is here to stay regardless because the ways people collaborate have changed.
So, to get back on topic, when someone sends you a paginated document, it means they want it that way.
If it’s a PDF, it means they want no changes to its pagination whatsoever.
If it’s a DOC, DOCX, or ODT, it means they want you to change it while checking you haven’t broken pagination with your edits before sending it back to them or forwarding it to someone else.
kurkosdr,
I wish this was common.
But even with Word’s excellent 3 way merge (think Git, but manual) it is usually very difficult to collaborate with other people.
In a document with meticulously selected fonts, and properly set up styles, like Header, Code, or Footnote, they would just hit Bold and type in Times New Roman for their edit. They would paste snippets from the web without even doing the slightest amount of style correction. And they would really mess up your layout flow, not only pagination.
And “it is your job” to fix their mess.
kurkosdr,
It’s the author’s prerogative…but to be honest if people find themselves micromanaging the document to this degree then I think they’re doing it wrong. Even in cases where it’s important to get right, it only needs be done at the end, not throughout. “Premature optimization”.
These are assumptions, but none of these statements is inherently true. They *might* want it that way, but it seems like you’re ignoring my point that these formats inadvertently add pagination to content where it was undesirable and unintentional. Like when I save a webpage to PDF to keep for my records – a sensible thing to want to do, but it’s objectively not great that the process introduces page breaks that didn’t exist at the source.
Again, my point isn’t that pagination is never useful, however it’s not always appropriate or desired and this is a legit gripe.
The PDF format supports really huge pages (381000km by 381000km), although 200×200 inches (roughly 5×5 meters) is what most software will take without crashing. Which is essentially page-less for most content and font sizes. The fact that the “print-to-PDF” functionality of most browsers doesn’t let you use such huge pages sizes is a legitimate gripe, but oh well, three things are certain in life: Death, taxes, and warts in software. But in the future they may fix it.
For LibreOffice Writer it again supports some huge sizes (3×3 meters or 6×6 meters, not sure), so it’s essentially page-less, and there is always View -> Web and saving to HTML if you want true page-less (this is good if you want to archive something without having to download the entire webpage plus files).
So yes, PDF and ODT technically force pagination on you, but on such large page sizes that it essentially doesn’t matter. DOCX only goes up to 22×22 inches, so it’s more restrictive, so don’t use it, I guess.
Now why so many PDF, DOC, DOCX, and ODT formats use Letter or A4 sizes? Simple: Most people assume that a PDF, DOC, DOCX, and ODT file will be printed, so they want to have control over how it gets clamped into pages. Even DOC, DOCX and ODT is “good enough” for most cases, haven’t faced a real world example when I saved a file and it had a broken layout on the other person’s computer.
kurkosdr,
That could be right, but relying on arbitrary values like that is what we call an ostrich algorithm in computer science…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm
There was an undesirable side effect in libreoffice: whitespace that didn’t exist in the source. I can zoom in or maybe do manual trial and error to find a page size that has neither page breaks nor whitespace. If you are just trying to offer workarounds to help deal with this problem, then that’s fair enough…thank you! However if you were suggesting this is they way things ought to be, then it seems like a glaring disconnect from your point earlier that professionals should be able to rely on software to faithfully represent the original without having to make manual corrections. To the extent that this argument actually holds any weight, then even you should share my gripes here.
I find they generally work well enough for my needs too (If there are unwanted page breaks I ignore them, oh well). However working in a team setting with Libreoffice has been more problematic. I do get MS word users complaining that I am breaking their styles. It doesn’t always matter, but when it does then everyone should really be using the same software. It puts me in a hard spot because I don’t own a recent copy of MS word and normally I don’t even run windows.
I’d be perfectly fine with this, Thom, if Word and Excel and such things were public infrastructure owned by the government, having their continued development paid for by taxes. Just the same as roads and so on.
I think his point is that it is irrelevant whether people outside the profession are fine with it or not.
By the way, to this date, there is no other piece of WYSIWYG software that allows you to color the vowel signs of languages such as Arabic and Hebrew independently to the base characters. Something which is important in teaching as well as religious contexts. Only Microsoft Word does that. And no, neither do LaTeX nor HTML/CSS allow for this. If this is the state of things in one such specialized field/usecase, then I’m wondering about all the others, as well.
Years spent in the professional media space have left me with nothing but contempt for most word processors, but back then I was working on SG with Postscript. Years ago I’d say Wordpefect was the best general purpose solution, and I would have thought it was the professional writers preferred solution. When WP died it’s death I sort of skipped Word and went to Open Office for a long time, I have very little need for anything of either these days but if I did I’d probably go with something like Lyx if I needed it, which is a bit of a sad indictment on the state of document processing.
Back in time it was supposedly WordPerfect to be always alive within law industry. It is even mentioned in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers