Re:The future of education is plain text
by paultopia on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @01:37PM
(#14546721)
Ugh ugh ugh no.
Storytime. A couple years ago, I was in the midst of copyedits on a book with a bunch of math in it. The copyeditors were using a different version of Word.
When they sent the edits back to me, the math was gone. Completely.
Not only that, but when I tried to copy-paste the math in from a prior draft, the Word file refused to save.
Eventually, I had to reconstruct every one of the damn things, by hand.
(Happy consequence: I caught and corrected an error doing so. But still!)
That would never happen in a plain text format. And this was the experience that made me abandon word processors for good.
Storytime. A couple years ago, I was in the midst of copyedits on a book with a bunch of math in it. The copyeditors were using a different version of Word.
When they sent the edits back to me, the math was gone. Completely.
Not only that, but when I tried to copy-paste the math in from a prior draft, the Word file refused to save.
Eventually, I had to reconstruct every one of the damn things, by hand.
(Happy consequence: I caught and corrected an error doing so. But still!)
That would never happen in a plain text format. And this was the experience that made me abandon word processors for good.