Wow it sounds like you're describing exactly me. All the way until the touchscreen laptop with Windows 8. Scary shit!

I used to laugh at the LaTeX masochists in college spending 15 minutes just to put a picture where they wanted the picture to be. They had to add like four 1-character modifiers to the "insert image" command, each of which meant "yes, really here", "no, don't move it to the next page" and "nono, really really here".

MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic. Has great referencing tools etc, fantastic formula editor and so on. And, well, you can use ultra modern human-machine interaction technology such as a mouse to choose where a picture goes and how big it is.

(They might've enshittified it since; the last paper I wrote was in 2010 and Word was pretty damn decent back then)

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Someone an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic

MS word also has character styles (like a CSS style on a <span>). IMO you should use instead of bold or italic.

(There are three more types of styles: linked, table and List. See https://office-watch.com/2022/word-five-types-styles/)

	▲	skrebbel 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm aware, but Word's notorious "I clicked one button and it ruined the formatting of my entire document" stuff doesn't happen if you mark a word as italic or bold here and there in the middle of a sentence. The whole point of only using the style rules is to prevent it doing that. But yeah for layout, ie headings and the likes, only ever use the styles, never "bold, bigger bigger bigger". Don't touch the line spacing button, etc etc. IMO Word could do with a mode where those buttons are simply hidden. Want a bigger, fatter heading? Edit the heading style. There's no other way.

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trympet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you also have a windows 8 laptop with touch screen?

	▲	skrebbel 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep! Sorry I just edited that in. Win8 is thoroughly underrated to me. The file open/close dialogs were shit but the start menu was very good. I quite liked the fullscreen apps and am sad they got discontinued. Fullscreen IE browsing with full touch support (eg swipe for back/forward, no window chromes in the way to mis-click on etc) was very cool. It made every website feel like a fullscreen app. It almost made the terrible browser engine (it was still IE after all) bearable. Almost. I'm pretty much still on the same setup now, Win11 plus touchscreen. You'll pry my touchscreen out of my cold dead hands. How will I rage-close a "try chrome" popup without a touch screen? You ever try to rage click something with a touchpad? Total non starter.