Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    Student Housing
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
Lingua Franca-Circular Icon

Lingua Franca

Language and writing in academe.

Word-Processing Misery

By Geoffrey K. Pullum March 13, 2017
8d4613c8eea3bfee4d27a56b2543509b
John Cleese

In a long-forgotten Monty Python sketch, John Cleese is driving a panel truck for the BBC. “I wanted to be in program planning,” he remarks acidly to a colleague, “But unfortunately I have a degree.”

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

8d4613c8eea3bfee4d27a56b2543509b
John Cleese

In a long-forgotten Monty Python sketch, John Cleese is driving a panel truck for the BBC. “I wanted to be in program planning,” he remarks acidly to a colleague, “But unfortunately I have a degree.”

I wanted to work in linguistics. But unfortunately personal computing was invented, and I ended up an amateur software engineer specializing in file format conversion and workarounds for word-processor bugs. I try to do a bit of linguistics in my spare time.

Left to my own devices, I would always write using William Joy’s marvelous creation, the Unix visual editor vi, creating plain text files in which I embed visible LATEX formatting codes. (As a little private joke the creator of LATEX gave it an official logo that is almost impossible to typeset unless you use LATEX — the HTML approximation I use for it here is not very good. In plain text documents the name is written as LaTeX or simply latex.) I then run pdflatex on the LATEX file, which produces a beautiful PDF. The software gives me untrammeled control over document appearance and typesetting details. It is all open-source, essentially without bugs, flexible and extensible, and completely free. (People say it’s a bit hard to learn, but c’mon, we’re intellectuals.)

ADVERTISEMENT

However, two unpleasant realities intrude. The minor one (temporary I hope) is that the rewritten and enhanced version of vi known as vim, which runs beautifully within the Terminal program under Apple’s macOS, triggers a bug in Terminal that seems to have arrived with the upgrade from El Capitan to macOS Sierra (I upgraded to version 10.12.3; every upgrade is a downgrade): Terminal randomly closes all windows and exits with an error box during vim editing sessions. An application operating inside a shell in a window program shouldn’t be able to crash the entire terminal emulator, but that’s what happened seven times while I was drafting this post. No one can figure out why, and Apple has done nothing about it. We vim-using engineers are a small and evidently unimportant minority.

The larger and more permanent unpleasantness is that publishers (and benighted co-authors and administrators) often require me to supply Microsoft Word versions of documents. I loathe Word. Bigger and slower-loading with each successive version, its new releases regularly bury features you needed, add features you didn’t, alter the interface, and move menu items so that simple necessities take half an hour of research to rediscover. And let’s not even mention font substitution or stability of special characters when ported to other machines (don’t make me relate the disastrous skull and crossbones incident).

My favorite WYSIWYG processor is (one almost wants to say “was”) WordPerfect. By the time of version 6 under either DOS or Windows, it was a superb product (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language was written using it, and was then formatted in India using LATEX). The sorry tale of WordPerfect’s decline among most user communities (it survives in the legal profession) is told here. Today it has no version that runs on a Mac.

Word has always lacked features like WordPerfect’s wonderful Reveal Codes mode, which permits you to see the exact locations of the normally invisible formatting codes in the file. Once I found my Word letter template file had become infected with secret codes telling Word that the text was supposed to be in French, so that all English words typed in were marked as misspelled unless they were accidental homographs of French ones, and French formatting defaults were enforced (an unpaddable space added before a colon, for example). Locating and fixing the secret invisible stuff that caused this was amazingly hard.

When I have to turn a beautiful LATEX file into a much inferior Word file that looks worse, my will to live is sustained only by the brilliant file-conversion tool and suicide prevention utility pandoc. (Almost unbelievably, it was written by an active professor of philosophy: John MacFarlane of UC Berkeley. Thank you, John. I love you.)

ADVERTISEMENT

Pandoc does a wonderful job of interconverting many different word-processing formats. But I still have to spend hours simplifying my LATEX code to make pandoc perform better, and then, after letting pandoc do the bulk of the work, fixing the remaining glitches caused by Word’s quirks and misfeatures.

That is how I spend much of my time. I wanted to be a linguist, but I ended up a file-conversion engineer and document-processing debugger. I guess it’s marginally better than driving a truck for the BBC.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

UCLA students, researchers and demonstrators rally during a "Kill the Cuts" protest against the Trump administration's funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles on April 8, 2025.
Scholarship & Research
Trump Proposed Slashing the National Science Foundation’s Budget. A Key Senate Committee Just Refused.
Illustration of a steamroller rolling over a colorful road and leaving gray asphalt in its wake.
Newly Updated
Oregon State U. Will End a Renowned Program That Aimed to Reduce Bias in Hiring
Dr. Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University.
Another probe
George Mason President Discriminated Against White People After George Floyd Protests, Justice Dept. Says
Protesters gather outside the Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 14, 2025 to protest the Trump administrations cuts at the agency.
An Uncertain Future
The Education Dept. Got a Green Light to Shrink. Here Are 3 Questions About What’s Next.

From The Review

Photo-based illustration with repeated images of a student walking, in the pattern of a graph trending down, then up.
The Review | Opinion
7 Ways Community Colleges Can Boost Enrollment
By Bob Levey
Illustration of an ocean tide shaped like Donald Trump about to wash away sandcastles shaped like a college campus.
The Review | Essay
Why Universities Are So Powerless in Their Fight Against Trump
By Jason Owen-Smith
Photo-based illustration of a closeup of a pencil meshed with a circuit bosrd
The Review | Essay
How Are Students Really Using AI?
By Derek O'Connell

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin