Microsoft WordPad: 1995-2024

May 28, 2024 7:14 AM

Originally introduced as a feature of Windows 95, the RTF-compatabile word processor Microsoft WordPad will be removed in the version 24H2 release of Windows 11, due later this year. The app will be missed, along with AI agent Cortana and help directory Tips, but will be survived by its older sibling, Microsoft NotePad.
posted by Smart Dalek (83 comments total)

Notepad now infected with AI garbage, because obviously that’s what you want from your basic level ascii text editing utility.
posted by Artw at 7:18 AM on May 28 [27 favorites]

*looks up from paper briefly*
posted by HearHere at 7:21 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]

*Microsoft removes 3 pretty useless features*

That's a good start, keep going....
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:26 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]

WordPad is pretty useful if you want to read/edit .rtf files, and .rtf was pretty useful if you wanted a lightweight document format with limited formatting that had a reader/editor available in every windows PC. Other document formats and other editors are available but it’s long been a useful go to, and I’m sure someone will miss it.

It’ll be interesting to see if it’s general use case gets replaced by something streamlined and slim or the most bloated shit imaginable, but I have my suspicions what it will be.
posted by Artw at 7:38 AM on May 28 [17 favorites]

I continue to be on track to hold on to Windows 10 until someone pries it out of my cold dead hands.

(Though nothing to do with this to be fair, I just can't deal with the changes to the task bar that make impossible to pull it to the side, where I can then see all my window titles.)
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:41 AM on May 28 [11 favorites]

I still use Notepad for everything. I love my .txt files.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:57 AM on May 28 [10 favorites]

I use Notepad frequently, multiple times a day (even multiple instances may be open at any time). But given LibreOffice I almost never bring up WordPad anymore, so, won't miss it. Would probably install TextPad if I was doing any developing now.

Notepad now infected with AI garbage

Something new in Windows 11? I'm seeing nothing like this in my Windows 10 Notepad.
posted by Rash at 8:03 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]

WordPad got me through times I couldn't afford Word. Thanks for being there for me.

.
posted by otherchaz at 8:08 AM on May 28 [11 favorites]

There are so many superior choices to either NotePad or TextPad.
posted by mcstayinskool at 8:08 AM on May 28 [2 favorites]

.

I have muscle memory for summoning Wordpad (or Textedit, on Macs). I've always preferred it to Notepad. I like RTF for casual use. It supports basic styling and tables. It's portable and widely readable. And it's lightweight compared to the behemoth that is Word.

I've never enjoyed the edit-in-markdown and then view-as-rendered workflow favored by text-based note-taking systems. Devs like them because they're like coding. Or, are coding.

There's a reason why Microsoft is Microsoft and Corel is a memory.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:17 AM on May 28 [2 favorites]

There are so many superior choices to either NotePad or TextPad.

Indeed, Notepad++ just for the dual pane, multitab feature alone is a lifesaver. I use it at work all day, every day.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 8:18 AM on May 28 [23 favorites]

Microsoft integrates Notepad with Copilot on Windows 11
posted by Artw at 8:19 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]

WordPad was great for when you just wanted a light word processor (not text editor) with basic formatting options. I used to work with a lot of people who didn't have Word (or had pirated versions that they couldn't always open...) and none of them ever knew about WordPad, but it solved a lot of problems. (This was before Google Docs & co. It's nice that there are cloud solutions now, but it was nicer to always have a built-in, unchanging, free piece of software that didn't try to track you or sell your data or make you sign in with yet another account.)

I wrote most of my school papers on it. I think we had Word, but WP was barebones and nice.

I haven't been on Windows for a long time but hearing about what's happened to Notepad, WordPad, and (until it was apparently brought back) Paint made me kind of sad.
posted by trig at 8:23 AM on May 28 [7 favorites]

Theoretically you could have a markdown editor that never lets you see the code but given its most enthusiastic base of support is coders… yeah, that’s unlikely.
posted by Artw at 8:24 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

I continue to be on track to hold on to Windows 10 until someone pries it out of my cold dead hands.

(Though nothing to do with this to be fair, I just can't deal with the changes to the task bar that make impossible to pull it to the side, where I can then see all my window titles.)

I just updated my home machine to Windows 11 on Sunday. StartAllBack will fix the taskbar, start menu, explorer, control panel, etc.
posted by Foosnark at 8:29 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]

Lmao I didn't realize they even still did Microsoft Word. It's probably been 15 years since I've seen that program.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:10 AM on May 28

.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:11 AM on May 28

WordPad was the program you used when you needed a quick print of a sign saying STOP EATING MY LUNCH OUT OF THE FRIDGE in varying fonts and styles on the same page. Notepad couldn't do that.

Maybe Copilot can do it in one prompt? Doubt it.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:20 AM on May 28 [9 favorites]

WordPad has gotten me out of countless jams when working on a computer that didn't have Word. RIP to it.

I've never enjoyed the edit-in-markdown and then view-as-rendered workflow favored by text-based note-taking systems.

Typora has been my go-to Markdown editor precisely because it gets rid of the separate edit-and-view windows in favor of a single window that shows headers, text styling, and so on. It'll let you see the underlying Markdown code if you really want, but you don't have to mess with it if you don't want to.
posted by sgranade at 9:34 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]

A printer with a built In keyboard for printing out passive-aggressive office signage would revolutionize the industry

don't make me start a company please
posted by phooky at 9:35 AM on May 28 [16 favorites]

Labeler MAX.
posted by Artw at 9:38 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]

That's called a typewriter, phooky. You've reinvented the typewriter.
posted by autopilot at 9:38 AM on May 28 [21 favorites]

I will miss WordPad. Not because I still use it, but 20+ years ago it generated pretty clean RTF files. And as part of my job was generating RTF by hand, and/or parsing RTF to store derived data in a SQL database, clean RTF files were a small lagoon of respite in an ocean of shitty, shitty markup.

(pro tip: never do anything with RTF manually. It makes XPress Tags look like fun.)
posted by scruss at 9:40 AM on May 28 [6 favorites]

Honestly I like Notepad’s current state. It supports tabs and it persists a temp file so you can just leave it open across reboots. Didn’t know they planned to integrate it with Copilot, but I should have guessed.

As long as I can turn that part off I’ll keep using it. Notepad++ is great, but honestly I don’t find myself using 95% of its features these days.
posted by Room 101 at 9:49 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

A typewriter with large enough typebars to print 72-point comic sans would weigh two hundred and eight pounds and require a small sledgehammer to actuate the keys
posted by phooky at 10:06 AM on May 28 [14 favorites]

Obviously it would be an electric typewriter, the comics sans would be rendered from individual normal sized characters, with each keypress activating a macro to type out the ASCII art.
posted by Artw at 10:09 AM on May 28 [7 favorites]

I've never enjoyed the edit-in-markdown and then view-as-rendered workflow favored by text-based note-taking systems.

I solve that by just not rendering it. The idea of markdown is that it's supposed to be readable *in its text form.*

OK, links can get out of hand, and the # headers go the wrong way, but that's how I do most of my writing.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:12 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]

At least Notepad can now gracefully handle UNIX line endings. That little feature only took three decades to see the light of day.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:16 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]

There's a reason why Microsoft is Microsoft and Corel is a memory.

Yeah. Microsoft's borderline-criminal business tactics.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:20 AM on May 28 [11 favorites]

Wordpad was originally Microsoft Write, which has been with Windows since the beginning: it debuted in 1.0!

Like other longstanding programs like Solitaire (replaced by a Microsoft Store game with ads in Windows 10) and Cardfile (my Dad's favorite, went away around the time of XP), it's fallen victim to MS herding users towards their paid, or at least monetized, alternatives.

I do think, finally, at long last, the writing may be on the wall for Windows. It'll stumble along with a majority market share for a while, and may hold out a bit longer in business situations, but there is a sense that things are changing. Why? Because of Steam Deck.

At work, Office helps prolong the Microsoft hegemony. At home though, the fact that Windows has long been the default platform for games has kept it going there. But while the Steam Deck can run Windows, it runs Linux out of the box, and most users won't change that. And now Valve has sunk so much effort into improving Proton that many games work well on Linux, at least if you're using Steam and known to enable it.

I mean sure, the internet is scattered with pronouncements that this time Windows is finished. Let's see where we are in five more years.
posted by JHarris at 10:26 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]

There's a reason why Microsoft is Microsoft and Corel is a memory.

Recently Humble Bundle did a collection of Corel programs, including WordPerfect, and I sprung for it. In exchange, I got a version of their QuattroPro spreadsheet that often pops up three disruptive error boxes when I paste multiple cells, a version of Corel Painter Essentials that immediately shuts down on my machine when I try to start it, and versions of CorelDraw Essentials and PhotoPaint Essentials that present me with an ad for their latest versions when I start them. That is what Corel stands for these days.

And yet, WordPerfect is still valuable. It has the Reveal Codes feature that's essential for knowing exactly how your document is formatted. That's a feature that, astoundingly, has never caught on anywhere else. Hey LibreOffice, it's just lying there on the ground, waiting to be picked up!

WordPerfect is still beloved to the legal profession, I've given to understand.
posted by JHarris at 10:33 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]

this time Windows is finished

Kind of feels like Win7 was when it was feature complete and every step since has been a downgrade.
posted by Artw at 10:37 AM on May 28 [9 favorites]

There are so many superior choices to either NotePad or TextPad..

Superior in what way? I need a blank doc to write text in. Notepad does that. No other needs on my end. It looks like those who need more are programing something? I'm writing out my calendar and grocery lists.
posted by tiny frying pan at 10:49 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]

I feel that way too, except with Windows 98, which I think was what brought us USB plug-and-play. Maybe call it at Windows XP, where they switched to the NT kernel. Casting back, there are surprisingly few user-facing elements of Windows that have stuck throughout the years. They're constantly making bad decisions that have to be rolled back later. I already listed them in a recent comment elsewhere, but I'll just say one word that will send shivers down the spines of People Who Remember: Charms. ~ shudder ~
posted by JHarris at 10:49 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

I use Notepad most days, and I already found Notepad 11 to be less helpful to me than Notepad 10. If it gets bundled with Copilot, I'm sure it will suck even more.
I'm a fan of Notepad++, but it's way more than I need for most things.
I wonder if I can just copy Notepad 10 onto my 11?

Steam Deck is responsible for Windows' decline? Games is where Microsoft makes its money?
I thought Microsoft just had the corporate world in its pocket, and most of those places lock down the games.
posted by MtDewd at 10:56 AM on May 28 [2 favorites]

wordpad is just shy of 30 years, which puts it at around 7.5 times the average lifespan of a google product
posted by i used to be someone else at 11:11 AM on May 28 [6 favorites]

I wonder if I can just copy Notepad 10 onto my 11?
Not exactly, but there's a registry hack.
posted by MtDewd at 11:14 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

It’ll be interesting to see if it’s general use case gets replaced by something streamlined and slim or the most bloated shit imaginable, but I have my suspicions what it will be.

I'm pretty sure the intended replacement for Wordpad is everybody paying $10/mo for Office 365.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:59 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]

A typewriter with large enough typebars to print 72-point comic sans would weigh two hundred and eight pounds and require a small sledgehammer to actuate the keys

but by gods hammering out your angry message would be super satisfying!
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:07 PM on May 28 [7 favorites]

this time Windows is finished

Kind of feels like Win7 was when it was feature complete and every step since has been a downgrade.

Some folks think the last good version was XP, but the back end people prefer Win2K3.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:17 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

A typewriter with large enough typebars to print 72-point comic sans would weigh two hundred and eight pounds and require a small sledgehammer to actuate the keys.

It's funny how sometimes you don't even know you have certain life goals, until someone else points them out for you.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 12:52 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]

until someone else points them out for you.

I see what you did there.
posted by Melismata at 12:54 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

If you ever used Notepad or Wordpad, just grab notepad++ right now.

If you want easy-open, zero-dataloss-autosave text editing, accept no substitutes. Control-T, start typing, it is a game changer. It is one of the few Windows tools I miss every day on any other operating system.
posted by mhoye at 12:55 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]

I do love notepad++ (but technically I only use it because I can't run bbedit on my work computer)

Every single move Microsoft has made lately makes me wonder what the heck they're thinking. Google too. Going all-in on AI to make your core products WORSE seems like a really dumb idea to me, but what do I know, I'm not a CEO of anything
posted by caution live frogs at 1:05 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

(My kid keeps asking me for a 'gaming computer' because he has an M1 Mac, and I keep trying to tell him that the last thing I want in my house is a Windows computer, especially one running a consumer [rather than enterprise] version of the OS, but he doesn't get it)
posted by caution live frogs at 1:06 PM on May 28

At least Notepad can now gracefully handle UNIX line endings. That little feature only took three decades to see the light of day.

This feels like the sort of thing Microsoft (at least Microsoft of old, I have little experience with them now) would purposefully not add, because the lack of support made it look like those Other People on Other Systems were sending broken documents, and thus the user would not be tempted to think about those Other Systems, let alone try them.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:15 PM on May 28

(My kid keeps asking me for a 'gaming computer' because he has an M1 Mac, and I keep trying to tell him that the last thing I want in my house is a Windows computer, especially one running a consumer [rather than enterprise] version of the OS, but he doesn't get it)

I don't know if it's more acceptable to you, but the Xbox plays a lot of Windows games now, since MS has worked on making porting between the two as smooth as possible, and has also tried to be very supportive of indie developers on Xbox. Or maybe you want to look at a Steam Deck.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:17 PM on May 28 [3 favorites]

Copilot did not do well on the passive/aggressive sign experiment.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:37 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]

This feels like the sort of thing Microsoft (at least Microsoft of old, I have little experience with them now) would purposefully not add, because the lack of support made it look like those Other People on Other Systems were sending broken documents, and thus the user would not be tempted to think about those Other Systems, let alone try them.

Web developers shifting en masse to Macs because of that kind of fuckery may have shifted an attitude or two.
posted by Artw at 1:51 PM on May 28

A typewriter with large enough typebars to print 72-point comic sans would weigh two hundred and eight pounds and require a small sledgehammer to actuate the keys

Someone send this to ididathing

WordPerfect is still beloved to the legal profession, I've given to understand.

This is where my familiarity with it comes from. And I wouldn't say it's "beloved." More like "entrenched." Or, "entombed."
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:07 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Yes on Steam Deck. Or otherwise take a Windows machine, bulldoze the harddrive, put Mint on it, then install Steam from its Software Store.

Once it's installed and you've created/logged into an account, go under the Steam menu item in the very upper-left corner of the window and go to the Compatibility tab. Enable Steam Play with all supported titles to get one level of support, Enable Steam Play for all other titles for more, and under "Run other titles with," choose the most recent non-experimental version of Proton. (Experimental might get you some extra titles, but YMMV.) ProtonDB maintains a list of titles that run well on Linux, both through Proton and natively. Games that are rated Silver or better are acceptably playable.
posted by JHarris at 2:17 PM on May 28 [3 favorites]

I wrote most of my high school assignments in wordpad, and did a lot of QuakeC in it too. These days I'm mostly using Notepad++ for code stuff, but I'll miss wordpad.
posted by signsofrain at 2:23 PM on May 28

mumble mumble vim mumble i'll see myself out
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:27 PM on May 28 [4 favorites]

WordPerfect is still beloved to the legal profession, I've given to understand.

Not nearly as much as it once was. Here's the deal with WP and Corel - Novell bought WordPerfect and ported it to Windows. The port was buggy and terrible. Riding high from Draw success, Corel bought it and other apps, (mostly) fixed it and pushed their own office suite.

I don't use WP anymore, but it is decisively superior to Word.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:29 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

The vast majority of law firms live in the hell Microsoft built. The ultimate goal of many legal tech startups is a desktop Word add-in. Word takes a full 40 seconds to start on my work computer with 11 add-ins. I have lost hope.
posted by lookoutbelow at 3:06 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

And yet, WordPerfect is still valuable. It has the Reveal Codes feature that's essential for knowing exactly how your document is formatted. That's a feature that, astoundingly, has never caught on anywhere else. Hey LibreOffice, it's just lying there on the ground, waiting to be picked up!

OMG yes, reveal codes is the best. You don't need to have it on all the time, but oh man when you need it it is so incredibly useful.
posted by wierdo at 3:11 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Not nearly as much as it once was. Here's the deal with WP and Corel - Novell bought WordPerfect and ported it to Windows

Six was OK, if slow as molasses. It got a bit iffy there for a minute, but WP10 was good again. Fewer bugs, and a lot more appropriate to the capabilities of the computers of the day. Back then Word was total shit at actually sizing margins correctly, dealing with preprinted letterhead and selecting the correct paper tray for a given paper type. WP would tell the printer to use plain paper or letterhead or bond paper and as long as nobody had loaded different paper without telling the printer it just worked.

Sadly, out of all my clients only a couple still use WP. Otherwise, at most a copy is kept around on somebody's computer in case ancient documents end up being needed for whatever reason.
posted by wierdo at 3:24 PM on May 28

I have a number of considered opinions and a number of semiconsidered opinions about software, tech, etc, which cash out as meaning that I haven't used this software in a while, but this makes me feel old and I'm not even old, more like middle-aged.
The other thing that makes me feel old is going back to school and suddenly being surrounded by people who have no memory of the 20th century but here we are.
posted by Whale Oil at 3:40 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

My law world still uses Word Perfect, it's true. Something about the macros and connection to the client database.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:05 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Never mind all those. WordStar is where it’s at.
posted by fimbulvetr at 4:22 PM on May 28 [3 favorites]

In LibreOffice Writer, View > Formatting Marks (or Ctrl-f10) shows the formatting marks but doesn't do a split screen like WP does. It also can print hidden text. I never used Wordperfect, so I'm not sure if it is an exact replacement or not. Oh yes, and you can search by format type in a document too.

To focus on the FPP, I used Wordpad a LOT when we got our first computer in 1996, and I used Lotus' suite too since it was an IBM Aptiva from Radioshack. Yes, I have grays coming in. It was super handy for basic formatting and lists. I loved making headings for my lists.
posted by tlwright at 5:02 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

This is not the first time I've heard LibreOffice Writer's Formatting Marks offered as a replacement for Reveal Codes. I don't know why people do that when it's absolutely nothing at all the same thing. Reveal Codes will reveal everything that's in your document that might potentially affect how it displays or prints, and it'll tell you where each code's markup begins or ends. It's rather like a window into an optional, print-focused HTML version of your document, but one where the system won't ever let you mismatch or forget to close tags.

It makes me feel rather like those Photoshop users who scoff when others recommend the GNU Image Manipulation Program. LibreOffice is an excellent program, over the years many of the rough edges have been worn off of it, and now I don't understand people who prefer Word to it for reasons other than compatibility. But to this day I've seen nothing that matches up to the sheer power of Reveal Codes.
posted by JHarris at 5:15 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

I used notepad daily - it's perfect for quick notes that I may or may not decide to save. I also use it to strip formatting out of other text when I'm going from Word into anything other than Excel (where I have my paste as plain text).

I don't want it to have another features. Well, except for maybe a really robust find and replace function which can identify hard returns or tabs.
posted by jb at 5:28 PM on May 28

Reveal codes was the best ever. I figured out how to display characters such as paragraph and tab marks in Word, but it's still not as powerful as reveal codes. You never had to use, but when you did, you could have such great control.
posted by jb at 5:29 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

"At least Notepad can now gracefully handle UNIX line endings. That little feature only took three decades to see the light of day." -- posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon

EMBRACE: WSL2
EXTEND: \n -> \r\n (finally)
EXTINGUISH: COPILOT IN ALL THE THINGS
posted by symbioid at 5:55 PM on May 28 [3 favorites]

Six was OK, if slow as molasses. It got a bit iffy there for a minute, but WP10 was good again.

Too late. 8 killed it. Everyone but the crustiest die-hards migrated.

That's a feature that, astoundingly, has never caught on anywhere else.

That's because WPD is a tagged text format. It's markup. DOC and especially DOCX has a bunch of binary blobs to persist various state.

Anyone know if Works used the same core as Wordpad?
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:28 PM on May 28

DOC and especially DOCX has a bunch of binary blobs to persist various state.

A Docx should just be a zip file with a bunch of xml files in it. Probably not the most easily parsed xml, but it should all just be xml.
posted by Artw at 8:06 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Artw's right. You can rename a DOCX to ZIP and look around inside. You can also do that with ODF formats and EPUB too.
posted by JHarris at 8:17 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Almost too much markup.
posted by Artw at 8:18 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Huh. I’ll have to dig into one. Maybe the zip encoding fooled me or maybe it’s just the older .DOCs I’m thinking of.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:30 PM on May 28

Yeah, the no x is for “no xml”.
posted by Artw at 8:38 PM on May 28

Copilot did not do well on the passive/aggressive sign experiment.

You say that, but I sure as heck would not be eating those sandwiches.
posted by Hermione Dies at 12:52 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

My husband asserts that Windows XP was the last version to truly have the user's interests at heart, and offers as supporting evidence the fact that "the shutdown sound made you feel satisfied to be turning off the computer to go do something better with your time".
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 1:25 AM on May 29 [4 favorites]

Indeed, Notepad++ just for the dual pane, multitab feature alone is a lifesaver. I use it at work all day, every day.

My only gripe is that it doesn't have the bookmarked lines feature that is as easy to use as Textpad's. I use both, however. Never really used WordPad after the Windows 3.x days.
posted by Dark Messiah at 8:21 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Re: Corel; there's still 5 days to get WordPerfect for cheap ...

In other news: Copilot is just three Clippys in a trenchcoat.
posted by farlukar at 8:34 AM on May 29 [2 favorites]

Don't forget, by default, Humble sets the split given to charity to like, a dollar, but you can manually adjust your donation splits to give the charity the biggest cut.
posted by xedrik at 10:08 AM on May 29 [2 favorites]

I use Windows at work, Mac at home. I'm not very Windows savvy and I don't even know what version of Windows we're using at work, or how to find out. I use WordPad heavily. As I work for a big government agency and have no control over my work computer, I don't know what's going to happen. I may wind up doing all my typing on my Mac's TextEdit and emailing it to my work.
posted by neuron at 11:40 AM on May 29

LibreOffice, which runs on nearly anything that's a desktop or laptop, can export to RTF, the WordPad file format, as can Word, if that helps you in any way neuron.
posted by JHarris at 1:21 PM on May 29

Fun fact: first thing to export it was Word on Mac.
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Over the last five-or-so-years, I've tended to create my documents using Markdown in a flat file, at least as a first pass. If they need to get any prettier, I'll put them through Pandoc to convert to Word, then tweak them. In addition to being light-weight and portable, it gets something like "reveal codes" by default.

My thing is this--and I'm quite ready to be corrected: it strikes me very strange that so much of our document generation targets paper first. Word is a big beastie. How many documents only exist as files passed around electronically? Of the subset that see hard copy, how many are in some formal, needs-to-look-nice format for the ages, versus simply printed for someone who just likes to read the hard copy, and not too worried about margins. Again, if someone were to say "MrGuilt, it's way, way, way more than you think," I'd believe you.

But my point is, it feels like in most offices we create long documents in Word, with all the conventions of printing, as opposed to targeting screens. I'll even suggest the desire for a tool that is screen-first is why we see awful, overly-dense PowerPoints. It's perhaps my biggest complaint about QR code menus: I don't necessarily mind being pointed to one, but a PDF of the print menu is not ideal for my phone.

I think there needs to be a new tool with a new paradigm that creates output optimized for screens (though, perhaps with a few options that can easily produce paper-optimized output).
posted by MrGuilt at 1:29 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

I believe the RTF format came about because it became a chore for Microsoft to create converters for all the many, many versions of Word documents through the years. It made more sense to create an "interchange" format that represented Word files internally, so a document could be re-saved to RTF and opened in a different version of Word. In this way, Microsoft accidentally created a somewhat universal document format for rich text.

MrGuilt, I think the obsession with the printed page in text documents is purely conceptual inertia, plus a certain convenience to be able to say, "Look at page 127, where it says...." The closest thing to a universal "continuous" or non-paged text presentation is web text, or HTML, which has no concept of page divisions. But HTML has never entered the popular consciousness as an editable document format, although nothing is preventing it from being that. This tension between paged text for word processors and web-style continuous text is evident in the LibreOffice Text menu bar choice of View > Normal (that is, paged) versus View > Web (that is, continuous).
posted by jabah at 4:12 PM on May 29 [3 favorites]

MrGuilt: My thing is this--and I'm quite ready to be corrected: it strikes me very strange that so much of our document generation targets paper first. Word is a big beastie. How many documents only exist as files passed around electronically?

This is a great point! The only documentation I am required to do for my job are knowledge base articles on the software we work with. Basically, FAQs for our team. These require lots of screenshots/screen grabs. I spend, no joke, three times the amount of time fitting the screenshots to 8.5 x 11 (or close to A4), then I do actually sharing technical details. Just dumping all the images in a .html file (which jabah suggests) makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE for times I am creating a doc for others.

(please don't suggest powerpoint. I'd rather just get out the glue and construction paper from my youth.)
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 6:55 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]

I wonder if I can just copy Notepad 10 onto my 11
Don't know, but I'm still on Windows 10 and have been managing to run classic MSPaint...
posted by cheshyre at 3:21 PM on May 30 [1 favorite]