see nerd) blog
why are word processors crap

Every few months, I get deeply annoyed with those software products that call themselves Word Processors. Not one of the damn things processes words. It’s so f***ing annoying. They just don’t seem to have the concept of what a word is, despite their own self-nominated category. Don’t believe me? Then consider this: a word, first of all, is something that is said. It is sound, it is many many qualities of sound. You really disagree? Try speaking words without using sound, then. Tell me one, any one, so-called Word Processor that has any concept of sound, of this essential nature of the word. None of them do, none of them. Word Processors: yet another triumph of marketing over truth.

This time, though, it’s something else that’s annoying me deeply. You’d think that, after 20 years of having these miscategorised products about, they’d have got round to working out what a booklet is. It’s just a document in which you print the last and the first page on the first sheet of paper, the second and the penultimate on the next piece, and so on. It’s something that’s so blindingly obvious kids have been making them at schools for centuries. Yes, centuries! But not one of these over complicated piles of commercial rubbish has grasped this blindingly obvious concept.

These products are such damn f***ing drivel. Even the free ones are crap. Here, I’ve got oodles of (legal) editions of Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Word Pro, Open Office, and not one of these damned products can print a document as a booklet. Quite a few claim to do so, but they can’t; they get the page order entirely wrong, or don’t grasp the incredibly obvious detail that two portrait pages get printed on one landscape sheet (not one portrait sheet, Open Office). What the fuck is up with the software industry that such simple simple things are beyond them?! Jesus wept, I shouldn’t have to do this by hand.