Microsoft Word Is Immortal

Re:Microsoft Word Is Immortal by tayari- on Thursday December 18, 2025 @03:55PM (#46318579)

The proposals suggesting markdown + git just sound like tone deaf proposals from 'coders' that are trying to push their square peg through a round hole. More appropriate proposals would be LaTeX + git or Word + subversion or some other vcs that has good binary support

Nonetheless, agree with the author that I don't see anything disturbing Word in that space for a long time, as good luck trying to get a middle-aged with minimal tech understanding to learn and use LaTeX over Word.

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Re:Microsoft Word Is Immortal by jpbryan on Thursday December 18, 2025 @03:58PM (#46318624)

Version control + binary file support is of limited utility for lawyers. They need to see what's changed from version to version, including formatting changes. This is why we spent years building out the document processing technology needed build version control for Microsoft Word.

I write a lot more about it in an earlier essay, "On Building Git for Lawyers."

https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-la...

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Re:Microsoft Word Is Immortal by jkartchner on Thursday December 18, 2025 @06:48PM (#46320459)

I'm a lawyer, though most of my writing is related to litigation, not contracts. I did this in my 30s. It worked just fine and made beautiful PDFs. However, judges got pissed, because they have their own software to automatically sign proposed orders. Colleagues got irritated bc they received only pdfs. Eventually I got fed up with it because latex is truly a PITA to draft legal citations and information.

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