The problem is that WYSIWYG is a concept that has almost nothing to do with writing. It's more about typesetting and layout. It's easy to write in a text editor or even this little box on HN. Now try to just write in Word. Wait until you're happy with what you've written before you change the way it looks. Then try to do some editing. Then send it to someone for collaboration. In no time at all, it turns into a big clusterfk. You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT. Gee, thanks a lot. Now I have to completely retype the section in my original font and/or color to get it to look normal again. To make matters worse, there's still an invisible space that's in RED BOLD UPPERCASE, waiting for your cursor like a landmine. Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process.

You don't need to do that. All you need to do is define your styles initially and reapply them as needed.

> You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT.

If you get someone who doesn't know how to use Word, teach them. Say, "Can you please turn on Track Changes and redo your changes, without the red bold uppercase?"

> Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process.

You get a better product when the writer is aware and competent at that. Maybe you're saying that that's too much to ask from the majority of writers, or maybe that extra increment of quality isn't worth it for the majority of books.

> Maybe you're saying that that's too much to ask from the majority of writers

It's not "too much to ask," it's something that requires much training and practice and a good sense of visual aesthetics, and writers shouldn't waste 10x the time to get half as good a result as someone who does it professionally. Of course, you should be aware of how the way in which you do your job affects how others do theirs (i.e. it'sveryhardtotypesetthisline,evenifit'sthewaysomeonesoundedwhentheyspoke), but you shouldn't do [an amateur version of] their job for them.

Even when the writer does the typesetting or formatting himself, it should still be the last thing done, AFTER all the writing is done. Trying to do the formatting while writing messes with both.

One way to go would be to split the text and layout like html/css.

or TeX

Actually, the article mentions that there is a "mini-industry of Word alternatives for novelists", and it links to an example: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

Presumably this is the kind of program the author is thinking of when he says that Word lacks features that assist composition.

I dropped "word processors" long ago, in favour of emacs and latex.

Word processors are the slalom of writing.

'No results found for "slalom of writing".'

Excellent!

Emacs/LaTeX for me as well, but some non-technical friends of mine have had success with Nisus Writer.

There is a small market for actually-good word processing systems out there, it's just that Word is (a) usually already there on people's machines and (b) superficially sufficient.

It's really not superficially sufficient which is the problem. It only seems that way because there's nothing else. IE actually is superficially sufficient, but people still go and get firefox/chrome/whatever. No one gets a word alternative because there aren't any (and I mean alternative in the functional sense, not the free vs proprietary OpenOffice sense).