But sometimes I do not want to use “Paste Without Formatting,” precisely because I want to keep the formatting of the text that I am copying and pasting. Even then, Word manages to screw up in spectacular fashion.

Consider the following situation:

Here, I have selected the last paragraph before a bullet list (by clicking in the left margin, which selects the paragraph with its paragraph mark). I copy it to the Clipboard with command-C, and then I scroll down the document and select another paragraph before a bullet list (again by clicking in the left margin, which selects the paragraph with its paragraph mark), which I want to replace with what I have just copied:

And then I press command-V to paste the copied paragraph with its formatting.

What do you think happens? This:

The pasted paragraph has now taken on the formatting of the following paragraph, which of course is the first item in the bullet list, thereby turning itself into a new first item in the bullet list!

Good grief. I would very much like to know in which completely warped alternate universe this behaviour actually makes sense. But there’s no point in asking, because there’s nobody home. The “brains” behind Microsoft Word is actually an empty cranium. I am willing to bet that, of all the Microsoft engineers working on Microsoft Office, there is not a single one who’s even aware of the absurdity of this behaviour, let alone willing or able to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, in the real world, real Mac users are trying to get things done. And with Microsoft products, that is always much more complicated and painful than it should be.

The problems even affect things as basic as window management.

I’ve already written about the fact that Word 2011 fails to properly support setups with multiple displays. I have two 30-inch monitors side by side in an extended desktop setup, and if I leave Word document windows open on my secondary monitor, after a while Word 2011 starts switching the windows back to the main screen all the time. The only way to stop this behaviour is to quit and relaunch Word.

Word 2011 also fails to preserve a document’s window position when you close and reopen it.

And if you use the “New Window” command in the “Window” menu to open the same document in a second window — this feature is one of the few advantages that Word has over Apple’s Pages, because it lets you view two different sections of the same document side by side at the same time — and then press command-W, Word closes both document windows in one fell swoop, which is totally absurd. (The command-W command should be strictly equivalent to clicking on a window’s red close button, i.e. only close the foreground window.)

Word also fails to keep the current selection highlighting visible in a background window, using the background highlighting colour (a light grey).

Here is a new one to add to the list of Word’s failures in window management. Say you are using Word’s split bar to split a document window into two sections, each able to display a different section of the same document.

Then you switch to another document window, leaving the document window with the split bar open in the background.

Now take your mouse pointer and start hovering above the split bar in the background window. Here’s what happens in Word 2011 on my machine:

Yes, this is the cursor hovering over the split bar in a background window. Whenever you move the mouse pointer, Word displays the tooltip and the alternate cursor, which seems to indicate that you can actually click and drag on the split bar to adjust its position.

Of course you can do no such thing, because the split bar is in a background window, and one click on it will simply bring the window to the foreground, without doing anything with the split bar.

I regularly find myself forgetting this and clicking and dragging to adjust the split bar’s position, which of course does not work because the window is not in the foreground.

It would also help if, when a document window with the split bar visible is in the background, Microsoft would change the colour highlighting used for the split bar control itself from blue to grey, in order to reflect the fact that it is in the background and cannot be used. But of course Word does no such thing:

The only sign here that the window is in the background and that the blue control is actually disabled is the drop shadow from the foreground window next to it. But if I move that window away, there is no visual difference between the control in the background and the control in the foreground.

(Word also does not change the blue colour in the ruler controls when a document window is in the background.)

It’s all incredibly sloppy, but of course we all know that a Microsoft application will never have the level of polish and compliance with OS conventions that a proper Mac OS X application demands.

Notice anything?

Allow me to make it clearer for you:

Or:

Unless Word 2011 is lucky and its splash screen happens to appear on top of a fairly uniform background, you inevitably get ugly see-through effects that make it look as if the splash screen itself is badly drawn and “dirty.”

I guess that’s what happens when you put a delicate concept such as translucency in the hands of clueless software engineers.

My own personal experience with noise levels is that, overall, things have improved dramatically since the days of the horrendous PowerMac G4 MDD. Of course, I’d like my 2009 Mac Pro and my external hard drives to be even quieter (if not silent), but on the whole, most of the time the fan noise is tolerable and there are no whines or hums.

As for speed, I find that we have really reached a plateau in the past few years, partly because CPU performance has been increased, not by ramping up the chip’s frequency or so-called “clock rate,” but by multiplying the number of cores — and most software programs fail to make full use of these multiple cores — and partly because hard drive technology itself appears to have reached some kind of plateau too, if not in terms of capacity, at least in terms of speed.

At the same time, lately Apple and other Mac software developers don’t seem to have been as focused on performance improvements as they were a few years ago. Remember the days when one of the big selling points of a new version of Mac OS X was that, in spite of the addition of numerous new features, the new version was actually faster than the previous version on the same hardware? I haven’t heard Apple make such a claim in a while, and Lion, on the whole, certainly does not feel any faster than Snow Leopard was.

I shall not even mention here the abysmal performance levels of Microsoft and Adobe software on Mac hardware… It is positively embarrassing and shameful, but apparently these developers do not feel any embarrassment and certainly have no shame.

All this is to say that, as a power user who tends to work very fast and expect high responsiveness from his machine, I have always been highly aware of speed/performance issues and find myself on a never-ending quest for a faster, more responsive workstation. Because of this, for the past few years I have been keeping an eye on the evolution of the technology known as “solid-state drive” or SSD. I didn’t want to be an early adopter, because of the high cost involved (for limited capacity) and the uncertainty associated with this new technology, so I didn’t include an SSD drive in my custom configuration for the Mac Pro I bought in 2009, but I knew that, eventually, this might be an upgrade worth considering.

Then the other day, after I posted a blog item about performance levels in iTunes 10.4 and iTunes 10.5, I got an e-mail from a reader sharing his own experience with using iTunes to manage a large music library. He too had experienced problems with iTunes 10.4, but said that he had managed to work around them (to a certain extent) by replacing his machine’s startup hard drive with an SSD, even though his large music collection was still, of course, on a separate hard drive. His view was that one of the bottlenecks in iTunes performance is the library file itself, which can be kept on the startup volume, separate from the music files (by choosing the appropriate option for the iTunes Media folder in iTunes’s preferences). Even though his music files were still on a hard drive, the basic library files were now on the startup SSD, and this appeared to have helped significantly.

This got me intrigued, and I started to do some reading on the current state of SSD technology and available options for my Mac Pro. Because I have to use Microsoft and Adobe software in my work (and I am also a Logic Pro user), I knew that capacity would be an issue. I examined my startup drive carefully to identify what I could get rid of in order to reduce the total footprint of my system and applications, and determined that I would still probably need a drive with a capacity of at least 200 GB.

I checked a number of reviews, and ended up deciding to go with OWC‘s 240-GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD. It was definitely not the cheapest option, especially for me in Canada, since OWC is US-based, but I felt that it offered the right mix of performance, reliability, and support for me as a Mac user. It was still a hefty chunk of change ($499US + shipping, duty, and tax), but I felt that it was worth it at this point in time. Best of all, after discussing this with my employers, they agreed to cover the cost of the upgrade, given that they hadn’t made any contribution to my home office equipment in quite a while. (I purchased the 2009 Mac Pro with my own funds.)

I have never had any problems with OWC over the years, and I didn’t have any this time either. The shipping options are still rather expensive for Canada, and there is no escaping the duties and taxes at the border, but other than that, the delivery was super fast and I got the drive within a few days.

For the installation process itself, I had two options: either I could start again from scratch in order to create a clean Lion install and reinstall only those applications that I really needed, and then rebuild all my customizations and settings, or I could trim my existing startup volume and then just mirror it. In the end, I decided against doing a clean install, simply because it would have been a rather time-consuming process. I mounted the small 2.5″ SSD drive on the special Mac Pro adapter I got from OWC, and put it inside the Mac Pro in one of the four regular storage slots. (I already had a hard drive in that slot, but it was one that I wasn’t using much.)

I then used SuperDuper! to copy my startup volume (which I had managed to bring down to 160 GB of disk space) onto the SSD. The process took less than two hours. (I didn’t stay in front of my computer the whole time, so I don’t know exactly how long it took.) I then selected the SSD as the startup volume and rebooted.

I have now been using the SSD as my startup volume for a couple of days and my observations are as follows.

The transition was pretty much seamless. I didn’t have to reinstall any applications, and the vast majority of my settings and preferences were fully preserved.

The machine’s startup process is now significantly faster, especially after logging in. The trick that Lion uses to make you believe that everything relaunches instantly (by showing an image capture of your work environment first, basically) almost works. (With a regular hard drive, it is rather more frustrating: it looks like everything is launched instantly, but then you have to wait quite a bit just the same before things actually become usable.) This is important for me because, for a number of reasons, I probably end up rebooting up my machine more often than the average user. One of the reasons is that I am a member of the AppleSeed program, so I have to install new versions of Mac OS X on a regular basis and reboot. Another one is that, for some reason, in my work I tend to encounter bugs that require a restart. (The latest one is an occasional bug with SuperDuper! backups that causes an endless loom of mounting/unmounting disk images that can only be stopped by rebooting. Apple is investigating.) Yet another one is that I have yet to invest in a UPS system for my machine and our power utility here in Nova Scotia is notorious for its crappy service and frequent outages.

The process of launching the big, slow crap applications from Microsoft and Adobe is also significantly improved, which again is important in my case not just because I have to use these applications, but because they crash on a regular basis, which forces me to relaunch them again, and again, and again. They do not launch instantaneously now (like more lightweight, better designed applications do), but they do launch much faster, and that helps alleviate the issue somewhat.

The responsiveness of the system as a whole and of individual running applications is of course significantly better. It all depends on how much they depend on access to hard drives, of course. My SSD volume only contains my system, my applications, and my user folder, but all my documents and all my media files are still on separate hard drives. The reason for this is an issue of disk capacity. I have to leave some space free on my SSD (so that Photoshop can use it as a scratch drive, for example) and having the necessary disk space for all my files in SSD would cost me thousands of dollars.

But still, just having the system, the applications, and the home folder files (preferences, application support, caches, etc.) on a SSD does make a significant difference. On the whole, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s an order of magnitude faster. But it does provide a nice, significant overall speed boost. I don’t have time to take detailed, scientific time measurements in order to compare the responsiveness and performance levels with what I used to get with a hard drive, so my observations are inevitably subjective and impressionistic.

You also need to remember that this upgrade does not change anything to the situation with my Internet connection, which peaks at 1.5 Mbps and is sometimes significantly less than that. There is nothing that I can do about this for now, but things will change next year when we move into a new house with better Internet service. That will be the next big “upgrade” for my computer system and it will probably have a significant impact on the overall responsiveness of my system as well.

What about the situation with iTunes and my large music library? Well, things are definitely better, but I have to admit that the situation is definitely not as improved as I had hoped it would be. I still get the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, and the iTunes interface still suffers from far too many inexplicable hiccups and temporary freezes that don’t have any obvious cause. The performance of the third-party AppleScript scripts that I use regularly in iTunes is still totally unpredictable. I would say that, on the whole, things are twice as fast in iTunes as they used to be with a startup hard drive, but iTunes has such a long way to go that twice as fast is still not enough to bring it to an acceptable level of responsiveness with a large music library like mine. (Like I said, only the iTunes application itself and the basic .itdb, .itl, and .xml files are on the SSD. The music/media files themselves are still on a separate hard drive.)

I should also note that one of the ways that I managed to trim down the disk space requirements for my startup volume was to move the entire contents of my “Downloads” folder to a separate volume. The folder itself cannot be moved or replaced with an alias, but you can select a different folder in Safari and in other applications as the destination for downloads, so that most downloads will go to that new destination instead of the built-in “Downloads” folder in your home folder. Even then, some applications are still not well-behaved and will continue to use the built-in “Downloads” folder, so I’ll need to continue to keep an eye on it from time to time, but most of my downloads will now go to a separate folder on a hard drive.

The reasons for this are not just that I tend to download quite a bit of stuff (mostly live Prince bootlegs, but also other stuff, like HD movie trailers, etc.) and that takes up quite a bit of disk space. My “Downloads” folder just a temporary storage space and the stuff I want to keep ends up being stored elsewhere. So there is a lot of reading and writing activity involved with this particular folder and I feel that keeping that activity on a hard drive instead of the SSD will help extend the life expectancy of the SSD. As well, most of these files do not need to be readable at a higher speed, since they are media files whose playback does not require more than HD-level speed anyway.

There are drawbacks to this approach, of course. Like I said, even though you can change the default destination for downloads in Safari’s preferences and in other applications, there is still stuff that will end up in that built-in “Downloads” folder. In addition, you can give your separate “Downloads” folder a custom icon if you want to, but as Lion users know, this won’t help in the Finder sidebar, where all folder icons have the exact same appearance, except for the built-in ones. So there is no way to give that separate “Downloads” folder a non-generic icon in the Finder sidebar. (I personally find this restriction maddening. What on earth is wrong with wanting to use colour and custom icons to make things more intuitive and easier to see and target? Isn’t that what having a GUI is all about?)

But on the whole, having a separate “Downloads” folder that is not in the default location is not a huge problem, and can help keep the disk space requirements for the SSD at a manageable (and affordable) level.

Apart from these improvements, the only small problem I have noticed with the SSD so far is a new behaviour in NetNewsWire that I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes, when I browse RSS feeds, when I select the next entry in a feed, there is a small hiccup of a second or two before NNW actually switches to that next entry. Then again, maybe I had the problem before, but whenever it happened, I would hear lots of hard drive activity and sort of know what was going on, whereas now, of course, a SSD is perfectly silent, so I can no longer tell when there is, for whatever reason, lots of disk activity that might explain a temporary slowdown.

The bottom line here is that my startup volume in my Mac Pro is now a 240 GB SSD, which is only two-thirds full, and this provides me with a really nice overall performance boost, especially in those crappy applications from Adobe and Microsoft that are so painful to use, yet so necessary in today’s professional world. Switching from a hard drive to a solid-state drive is not a life-altering experience, but it is probably as good as, if not better than, getting a brand new machine (i.e. a 2011 Mac Pro) with regular hard drives.

With a five-year warranty on the SSD, I am reasonably confident that this investment will bring lasting benefits and that, whenever I upgrade to a new machine, I will be able to continue to use this drive, if not as the main startup volume, at least as another fast drive for some of my applications or documents.

Why? Because Word’s features are simply completely unreliable.

Try the following. Create a blank new document in Word 2011 and type the word “test” in it. Then use “Insert > Text Box” to insert a separate text frame in the document and type the word “test” inside that text frame.

Then click back on the body of the document (outside the text frame), bring up the “Find/Replace” dialog box (not the UI monster known as Word 2011’s “new and improved” search feature, which is yet another totally useless piece of crap) and type “test” in the “Find:” field.

If you use the “Find Next” button in the dialog box to cycle through all available occurrences of “test” in the document, Word 2011 will correctly identify both the occurrence of “test” in the body of the document and the occurrence of “test” in the text frame.

However, if, instead of using the dialog box, you use the “Find Next” command, which is something that I do all the time, then, after the first found occurrence, you will get this:

In other words, when using “Find Next” instead of the dialog box button, Word 2011’s Find command completely ignores the occurrences of the text you are looking for that are in text frames and behaves as if they didn’t exist.

I simply cannot tell you how helpful this is in my work, when I have to edit existing Word documents with text frames, and I constantly have to use the Find/Replace commands to scan through all available occurrences of a given word or phrase.

Word 2011 is a stinky piece of shit.

I have already written about the fact that each and every use of the “Copy” command or command-C triggers some kind of background saving operation that interrupts the flow of one’s work. If, like me, you are a fast typist and depend on the application’s responsiveness to your keyboard input, you are out of luck. Each and every use of the Clipboard will force you to pause in your typing because otherwise you might end up with results that you didn’t want due to the disconnect between what is shown on the screen and the keystrokes that Word has actually registered and only failed to process in a timely fashion. It is positively maddening. Am I supposed to refrain from using the Clipboard altogether? Or to force myself to slow down and work at the leisurely pace imposed by Microsoft’s lousy software instead of my own normal pace? Who are they to decide how fast I should work? On a 2009 Mac Pro with 16 virtual cores and 12 GB no less… Apparently, that hardware is still not fast enough for Microsoft’s developers to be able to offer responsive software to their users.

And then there are all the other bugs… One particular bug that has been endlessly irritating for me in the past couple of weeks is that Microsoft Word 2011 is simply unable to reliably preserve my document windows’ positions on my dual-monitor set-up. More often than not, after Word 2011 has been running for a while, all the windows that I have moved to my secondary screen are forcibly moved back to my main screen by Word 2011 every time I use command-Tab to switch back to the application from elsewhere (and I do that a lot, because I constantly have to look things up with various other applications).

Of course, since Word 2011 is unable to remember a document window’s position when you close the document window and then reopen it, I probably should not be surprised. But this happens even without touching the document windows! They are still open, but instead of staying on the secondary screen, they are forcibly moved back to the main screen, and I have to manually move them back to the secondary screen again and again.

The only solution once this starts happening is to quit and relaunch Word. But of course, since Word 2011 fails to remember my document windows’ positions and also the cursor’s position in each window when I close the documents and reopen them (which quitting and relaunching forces me to do), this means that, each time this bug hits, I not only have to quit and relaunch Word, but also manually reopen each and every one of my document windows and position it back where I want it and manually scroll down to the desired position where I was when I was forced to quit Word. When, like me, you frequently have multiple document windows open side by side, this is a major annoyance. Grrrrr!

I know that Lion introduces a new behaviour where applications are supposed to remember their exact status (including all open windows, window positions on the screen and scrolling positions within each window), but of course, Microsoft Word does not support that Lion feature and probably will not until at least the next major iteration of the software, which will be several years down the road. And even then, I wouldn’t count on Microsoft’s engineers being able to support this feature properly. After all, they have effectively made Word 2011 worse than previous versions of the software when it comes to remembering window positions. So obviously they don’t care one bit about such issues. Maybe Apple’s own improvements will force them to start caring, but I wouldn’t bet a cent on it myself.

Even after all these years, I still cannot believe how crappy Microsoft’s software is and how absurd it is that we are forced to use it and live with its hundreds of annoyances and bugs on a nearly continuous basis.

For example, if you use a recent version of Microsoft Word, it is impossible to open a old Word 3 file with it. And even more recent file formats such as the Word 5 file format pose significant problems. First of all, you are forced to open such files using the “Open File” dialog exclusively.

Take the following file:

Even though the Finder erroneously describes it as a “Microsoft Word 97 – 2004 document,” it is actually a Word 5 file. If I double-click on it or drag it and drop it onto the Word 2011 icon, I get this dialog box:

How ridiculous is this? How on earth can a Word 5 file from the pre-Word 6 era, i.e. from before macro commands were even introduced in Word, pose any kind of security threat that Word 2011 is unable to deal with?

If I actually want to open this Word 5 file with Word 2011, I am forced to use the “Open File” dialog instead — and this is true for each and every such file that I might want to open in Word. There is no option to turn off this idiotic “security” feature.

But even if I use the “Open File” dialog, I still find that, for a significant number of my old Word 5 files, Word 2011 simply fails to open them. And instead of giving an error message, it simply… freezes solid. I am forced to force-quit it and relaunch it each and every time I encounter such a file. And of course there is no way to predict whether the Word 5 file I want to open will trigger this freezing behaviour or not.

I was recently off work and one of my “holiday projects” was to get ready for the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). As you probably know, in Lion, Apple has decided to eliminate Rosetta, i.e. the emulation environment that enables pre-Intel applications to run in Mac OS X on machines with Intel CPUs. This means that the only applications that will run under Lion are either Intel-only applications or so-called “Universal” applications that run on both PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs.

What this means more specifically for me, among other things, is that I will be unable to run older pieces of software that I still need to use from time to time. Once such piece of software is Dataviz’s MacLinkPlus Deluxe. It has not been updated in years and probably never will be, and of course it dates back to the PowerPC days, which means that it will no longer run under Lion.

Why is this important? Because it is the only application that I know can fairly reliably convert old Microsoft Word files to a more recent file format, which Microsoft Word itself is unable to do. MacLinkPlus Deluxe cannot recover old Word 3 files either, unfortunately, but at least it recognizes Word 5 files and can convert them to a variety of file formats, including the Word 98 / 2001 / X format (which current versions of Word still recognize, although who knows for how long).

And so one of my activites during my time off was to batch-convert all kinds of old Word files with MacLinkPlus Deluxe. It wasn’t pain-free, mind you. MacLinkPlus Deluxe was never a very good piece of Mac OS X software, and it suffers from a number of bugs and flaws. For example, it produces converted files with truncated names. (It doesn’t support more than 31 chars in file names.) It fails to add the proper file extension (which can be remedied using a tool for batch-renaming files, such as A Better Finder Rename) And it too does freeze/crash or fail from time to time.

But at least you can drag-and-drop an entire folder of files and instruct the software to convert all its contents to a more appropriate format (and it can do old Excel files as well).

I didn’t actually ask it to convert my files to that Office 98 / 2001 / X format, because I simply do not trust Microsoft (and I have no ready-made solution to batch-convert such files to the latest .docx format either). So I chose RTF, which is the lesser of the two evils. It’s still a Microsoft-sponsored file format, but it is widely recognized, so I am hoping that my files will be safe for a while in that format. (They open in TextEdit or Pages without any difficulty.)

The whole process still took me a while. (I have many old files that I don’t really want to lose.) But I don’t regret having spent my time on this. There is simply no justification for giving up on older files simply because the technology has evolved and made the file formats obsolete. I might never need these files again, but one never knows, and future-proofing them only took me a couple of days. In the big scheme of things, it’s not too much time.

I still find it absolutely shameful on Microsoft’s part that they are not even providing backward compatibility for their own file formats. Why should Word 2011 be unable to open a Word 3 file? So what if 25 years have elapsed? Obsolete hardware is one thing. Obsolete software is another thing, and obsolete file formats is yet another one. I can understand that ensuring backward compatibility for software beyond a certain period might be too difficult/costly. But what’s the excuse for file formats? especially your very own file formats? from a time when software and hardware were orders of magnitude simpler and leaner than what we have access to today?

Of course, Apple itself is not innocent in this regard. iWork applications are unable to open older AppleWorks files, let alone MacWrite files. But the Apple file formats were only ever used by a minority, and the impact of no longer supporting these file formats, while just as cynical, is much smaller. It’s still annoying as hell, but I am afraid that, when you are in the minority, you are used to having to develop coping strategies, which include taking your own precautions for future-proofing your data.

But the Microsoft file formats are very widely used and have been so for a couple of decades. I am not aware of open source-based solutions here either. I tried opening my older files with NeoOffice and OpenOffice, and it didn’t work either.

So if you are planning on upgrading to Lion and have old files that you do not want to lose access to, you might want to take some precautions and take advantage of your current ability to run older applications that still recognize these old files and can convert them to more recent formats. Of course, unless you buy brand new hardware, even if you upgrade to Lion, you will still have the option to install or keep an older version of Mac OS X on a separate partition and run that older system (and the applications that require it) on your current hardware for several more years. But maintaining and using several system volumes consumes time and space, and you don’t want to wait too long and find one day that you no longer have access to the older hardware and software that you need to access your old files.

The latest example comes from Forkbombr and is titled “Markdown is the new Word 5.1.” Here’s an excerpt:

Microsoft Word 5.1 came out in October of 1991. It was the culmination of six years of Mac Word versions (version 1 and 3; there was no Word 2 for Mac because it skipped version numbers to match up with the DOS version), a minimalist interface with just enough window chrome to let you align text, pick a font, space your lines—do the simple things you need to do when composing a document. No multimedia here, no fine-grained control over typeface features (if only because there weren’t any fine-grained typeface features), no nothing that didn’t need to be there.

The author even provides a screenshot:

And to me, this screenshot is particularly telling. Do you see anything in this user interface for easy access to paragraph and character styles? In fact, I am pretty sure character styles didn’t even exist back then. All character-level formatting was manual. (There is a single menu for accessing paragraph styles, in the toolbar. Changing/viewing styles requires multiple clicks.)

Do you see anything to access such essential features as Space Before and Space After, or Keep With Next and Keep Lines Together? (There is a single toolbar button pair for 12-pt increments of Space After. That’s it.)

To me, these are all essential features in a modern word processor, not “fine-grained” stuff for fussy perfectionists. Word 5.1 provided only rudimentary access to them. How does this make it the perfect word processor?

The author then goes on to argue that John Gruber’s Markdown is the new Word 5.1. I love John Gruber’s writing and I read his blog every day. But I don’t use Markdown and I don’t see what the big deal is. Why? Because it only provides a bare-bones syntax for basic manual formatting options. Here again, there are no options for the web equivalents of user-defined paragraph and character styles, which are block-level and span-level CSS styles.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t one of the main attractions of web-based publishing the ability to apply markup to one’s text in a smart way? As far as I can tell, Markdown encourages you to treat all occurrences of italics formatting as emphasis, and all occurrences of bold formatting as strong emphasis. But italics and bold formatting can be used for many other purposes. With CSS styles, you can define different character(span)-level styles that all looks the same (italics, or bold) but actually mark your words with references to different style names, associated with different meanings.

You cannot do that with Markdown. The way I see it, Markdown dumbs down web publishing by erasing the differences between the various meanings of italics or bold formatting, and by not providing easy access to other, user-defined character styles. And it also fails to encourage web publishers to use paragraph(block)-level styles other than the basic ones (headings, blockquotes, etc.).

So basically, while modern standards give us tools to apply markup to our documents in a smart way, a solution such as Markdown restricts the use of markup to a very limited set of elements. Sure, they might be the most common ones, but they also assume that writers do not want to bother to apply smarter, more fine-grained markup to their documents. They assume that writers still use their computers mostly as glorified typewriters.

To give a specific example, when I use italics in my own writing, the italics formatting can have multiple meanings:

• emphasis
• reference to a French word as word
• reference to a English word as word
• reference to a word in another foreign language as word
• Latin words or phrases
• document title in French
• document title in English

And that’s just some of them. In Pages ’09, I have a different character style for each of the above. Visually, they all look the same: they are all rendered in italics. But behind the scenes, I want my markup to distinguish between these various meanings of the italics formatting, because I want to be able to use spell-checking tools that will check French words against the French dictionary and English words against the English dictionary (and ignore other foreign words) and because I might want to have the option of being able to change, for example, the formatting of document titles to something other than italics further down the road, without changing other occurrences of italics formatting at the same time!

And of course I also want to have easy access to other user-defined character styles that I might use for specific purposes. In this blog, for example, I have different span-level CSS styles for references to UI controls, computer code, file names, etc. I couldn’t edit my blog posts using Markdown, because it wouldn’t let me easy apply all these in a user-friendly way.

Markdown does not help me do anything beyond basic manual formatting and is therefore useless to me (as are most other web publishing tools). And I find it paradoxical that someone like John Gruber, who seems to be such an ardent promoter of web standards, offers a tool that effectively dumbs down web publishing.

In that sense, yes, I suppose that one could say that Markdown is the new Word 5.1. Just like Word 5.1’s UI put the emphasis on manual formatting at the expense of style-based formatting, Markdown puts the emphasis on dumb HTML tags at the expense of custom CSS-style-based formatting.

But it does not mean that this is all that writers need. This is all that writers who do not want to bother to apply smart markup to their texts need. I have always been strongly attached to the use of smart markup, be it in word processing or in web publishing. I have yet to see a word processor that actually encourages its users to use smart style-based formatting. Pages ’09’s UI for styles is better than Word’s, but it still suffers from some severe limitations, such as the absence of support for hierarchical styles (styles based on other styles) and the absence of built-in support for keyboard shortcuts for styles (other than the very limited F1-F8 option).

I am not saying that designing a good user interface for smart, fine-grained markup is easy. But Word 5.1 certainly wasn’t the holy grail in that respect.

The other thing that Word 5.1 nostalgics seem to have forgotten is that document corruption already existed back then. I distinctly remember writing a whole chapter of my master’s degree thesis in Word 4 and finding myself one afternoon completely unable to open my Word document. I was faced with the prospect of having lost two weeks of hard work. I was eventually rescued by my local Mac shop, where some kindly technician took pity on me, took my diskette with my damaged document, disappeared in the back of the store for a few minutes and came back with a repaired copy of my Word document, which he was obviously able to produce with repair tools that I didn’t have access to.

Without him, I would have lost two weeks’ worth of hard work — and all because Microsoft’s software was already crap back then and was already able to create document corruption beyond the user’s control. And that was even before Word 5. I highly doubt that Word 5 was, somewhat miraculously, a corruption-free interlude between other versions of Word.

The one good memory of Word 5.1 that I have is that it was indeed fast. It could scroll through dozens of pages without a hiccup and I don’t remember ever having to wait for the word processor to catch up with my own typing — which still happens today in Word 2011, on hardware that is more powerful by several orders of magnitude than the Mac SE that I was using at the time! (The problem tends to happen especially in tables and text frames in Word 2011, but it also happens in certain larger documents, even outside tables or frames.)

It is truly embarrassing that Microsoft is unable to make a word processor that performs acceptably on a powerful machine such as my 2009 Mac Pro. And, while Pages ’09 is generally faster, it also suffers from performance issues sometimes, with documents containing tables in particular.

But for anything other than the performance, I am not particularly nostalgic for the days of Word 5.1. I was already hoping, back then, for a better, smarter word processor that would actually make it easy to compose smart documents — and I am still hoping for such a word processor today, twenty years later. I gave up on Microsoft a long time ago, and I have been much happier since I switched to Pages ’09 as my main word processor. But I have yet to find a truly great word processor for my Mac, and I certainly don’t see how anyone can claim that something like Markdown is a great tool, even in the more limited field of web-based publishing.

Today, I offer two short video clips shot on my own machine, a 2009 Mac Pro with 16 (!) virtual cores and 12 GB of RAM, running Word 2011. These clips were shot in real time and I believe they provide a pretty good illustration of how frustrating it is to use Word 2011 in the real world for real work.

The first clip was captured while I used the command-C keyboard shortcut to copy the current selection to the Clipboard. Here it is:

While you cannot see the keyboard shortcut, I want to stress that I pressed it as soon as I started recording the movie. As you can see if you play the movie or scan it in slow motion with the movie controls, after I pressed command-C, there was a delay of at least three seconds before Word appeared to start doing something in response to my keystroke.

And that thing is some kind of background saving operation that I never asked for and never expected to even see. I checked, and all background saving settings for Word 2011 are off in the application’s preferences. (They are totally useless, as typically after a crash the last automatically saved version is far too old to be of any use, especially if, like me, you are a compulsive command-S user anyway, because of past experiences.) So this “saving” operation has nothing to do with saving the document. For some reason, pressing command-C to copy the current selection causes Word 2011 to save something, and it takes up to several seconds before it initiates this process, and of course the whole thing causes the entire Word UI to stutter, because Word is unable to execute background processes without it interfering with the foreground performance of the application, even on a fast machine such as my 2009 Mac Pro.

This is not an isolated event. I can reproduce this again and again while trying to copy various (more or less complex) selections in various documents. Each and every time, there is a “Saving” process taking place after a delay, and each and every time it causes the UI to stutter and forces me to slow down or causes me to do something that I didn’t mean to do because I expected the UI to remain fully responsive at all times, which it obviously is incapable of doing.

The other example is even more obvious and has to do with Word’s “Font” menu. Like most people, I suspect, I am nowhere near perfect in my point-and-click gestures with the mouse, especially when I am trying to work at full speed, and my clicks are quite often a few pixels off, requiring me to correct my movement and repeat the clicking.

Unfortunately, in the menu bar, being a few pixels off can mean clicking on the wrong menu heading. This wouldn’t be a problem if all menus were pulled down instantly by the application. But consider what happens when you accidentally click on the “Font” menu in Word 2011:

Again, this was shot in real time and you can see that the delay lasts a good two seconds, during which Word 2011 even throws the old, outdated hand watch cursor in your face.

If, after this has just happened, I try to go over the “Font” menu again deliberately, this time Word 2011 pulls it down instantly, and continues to be able to do so for a little while. But after doing a few other things with my document, if I go back to the menu bar to pull down either the “Tools” menu or the “Format” menu, and if my clicking is once again off by a few pixels, back comes the hand watch and the wait.

How it is acceptable that, in 2011, on a 2009 Mac Pro, one has to endure such delays and such a stuttering UI on a systematic basis while attempting to work with a supposedly advanced, professional-level application?

Pages ’09 has no problems copying anything I select in any document directly to the Clipboard without any visible background activity and without any stuttering, and its user interface wisely avoids the use of a “Font” menu altogether, instead resorting to a palette that is, again, far more responsive than Microsoft’s own UI.

Fortunately, at least Word’s user interface is highly customizable, and so you can remove the “Font” menu from the menu bar altogether, which I have done on my machine.

But I am afraid there is no avoiding the poor performance of the application when using the Clipboard-related commands. Microsoft obviously uses its own proprietary way of handling interactions with Mac OS X’s Clipboard, and this proprietary way has been the source of several problems over the years, some of which remain unsolved today. The poor performance and stuttering caused by unwanted background actions in Word is a source of constant frustration and makes Word 2011 a poor performer even on a pro-level machine with tons of RAM and multiple cores that should be more than powerful enough for a word processor, no matter how “advanced” it is.

But finally it appears that Microsoft’s engineers have fixed the problem. It was still there in the original release of Word 2011, but I can no longer reproduce it in Word 2011 after the latest update, which brings its version number to 14.1.

And it works properly whether what is in the foreground is another Word document window or another application altogether. In all cases, simply hovering above the background Word document window with the mouse pointer allows you to scroll through that background window with the mouse without having to bring it to the foreground.

I have been moaning about this for long enough. The least I can do is write a final post saying R.I.P. to this particular shortcoming in Microsoft Word for Mac OS X. There are still places in Word where the scroll wheel/ball is not supported, but the problem is now limited to specific lists in specific dialog boxes and no longer affects the most basic aspects of document browsing in Word.

I will never know if my own moaning had anything to do with Microsoft finally fixing the problem, but the bottom line is that it’s fixed, and that’s what counts.

Today, I installed the latest Office 2011 update, whose description fails to mention anything about this bug, but when I try to open or save files with accented characters or < or > in the file name or anywhere in the file path, things seem to be working OK.

However, the following issues remain.

First of all, Word 2011 still refuses to open a file whose name contains a forward slash (/), even though the forward slash is a perfectly legal character for file names in Mac OS X. (The only illegal character in file names in Mac OS X is the colon.)

In other words, you can create a Word document with Word 2011, save it somewhere on your hard drive, edit its file name in the Finder to change it to something containing a forward slash — which the Finder lets you do — and then you can no longer open the file in Word 2011:

As you can see, Word 2011 is not even able to determine for sure that it is the presence of a forward slash in the file name that is causing it to fail to open the file. It just gives you a few guesses. What does that tell you about the quality of the Word 2011 code, that it’s not even able to tell what the exact source of its own failure is?

In addition, the portion of the error message that has to do with file names and illegal characters itself contains an error. Contrary to what this message seems to indicate, a backward slash (\) is perfectly legal and you can even use one within Word in the “Save As…” dialog box when entering the proposed file name.

Similarly, you can also use <  and > in file names within Word 2011 or edit file names in the Finder using these characters and Word 2011 will still be able to open them. However, if you open a file whose name contains \, <  or > (and probably some other characters too) in Word and then do “Save As…,” in the file name included in that dialog box, the \, < or > will be replaced with… an underscore. So, the characters are legal, but Word 2011 still changes them without the user’s consent when the user attempts to save an existing file under a new name.

Finally, I should note that the presence of these characters and even the forward slash elsewhere in the file path (e.g. in the name of the enclosing folder) does not cause Word 2011 to fail to open the file. Only the presence of the forward slash in the file name itself causes the failure.

I guess that overall it’s an improvement, but Microsoft’s engineers still appear to be unwilling or unable to following Mac OS X conventions and support all the characters in file names that are supposed to be supported in Mac OS X and are supported in Word file names when editing them in the Finder.

And when you combine two lousy pieces of software such as Office 2011 and Adobe Creative Suite 5 for Mac OS X, you sure get some explosive crap.

By which I mean this:

Yes, these are my desperate attempts, yesterday afternoon, to import a particularly refractory Word document into my InDesign CS5 publication using the “Place…” command — which is, as far as I am aware, the only way to preserve style-based formatting and several key typographic elements, such as non-breaking spaces.

I already wrote about this problem last year. At the time, I wrote about a bug causing InDesign CS5 (and CS4) to fail to import some footnotes, for no apparent reason, in Word files imported using the “Place…” command (and since this is a university review, you can be sure that they are tons of footnotes to import). I wrote that I was able to work around this problem by saving the Word files as .docx files rather than .doc files.

But I also wrote that I was experiencing a number of InDesign CS5 crashes when attempting to import certain Word files, even in the .docx file format.

I thought that I had identified the source of the problem when I found that some of my Word files contained hidden field codes or bookmarks. Eliminating those seemed to alleviate the crashes.

But yesterday I had such a .docx file. I made sure that there were no bookmarks and no field codes in the file. And still InDesign CS5 would crash every time I attempted to import the file.

I was able to import the file by converting it back to the .doc format, and also to the .rtf format, both of which the “Place…” command in InDesign recognizes, but in both cases, some of the footnotes were missing. (The missing footnotes were not the same ones for the .doc version and for the .rtf version, which clearly points to a bug in InDesign itself.)

This was not a satisfactory solution. I didn’t fancy having to restore the missing footnotes manually through cut-and-paste.

Finally, out of desperation, I tried the trusted old trick of saving the .docx file as a .htm file in Word 2011, and then back as a .docx file. It’s a pretty absurd thing, but I was desperate… And guess what? It worked. After the file went through this process, I was able to place it into my InDesign publication as a .docx file, without any problems, and with no footnotes missing.

Somehow, it appears that the .docx-.htm-.docx cycle in Microsoft Word miraculously eliminates some invisible corruption that causes InDesign to crash whenever you attempt to place the original Word document in a publication.

It is utterly ridiculous. But when you use the option “Save entire file into HTML” during the process of saving the file as .htm (as opposed to the “Save only display information into HTML” option, whatever it means), Word actually preserves all your style-based formatting, and so when you reopen the file and resave it in the .docx format, everything is preserved — except for that invisible crap that causes InDesign to crash, of course.

The HTML code that Word 2011 produces is of course beyond a joke from a web-standards point of view, but it does have the advantage of preserving all your style-based formatting.

I was able to verify this workaround with several files in succession: I went through the .docx-.htm-.docx cycle for each of them before placing them into InDesign, and I didn’t have a single crash after that.

In fact, I even noticed that the importing process itself was significantly faster in InDesign CS5. I do not know what it is that the .docx-.htm-.docx cycle erases, but it sure appears to be something that InDesign really does not like.

So, the bottom line is that this appears to be a fix that works for now. But I still find it absolutely scandalous

1. that InDesign CS5 crashes so easily and so catastrophically when attempting to import certain Word files
2. that InDesign CS5 still fails to import all footnotes when importing certain .doc and .rtf files, without warning and without explanation
3. that one has to go through such a workaround in Word just to fix some invisible crap created by Word itself

And I cannot help but worry that, Microsoft being Microsoft, at some point in the future they will decide that they want to “improve” the Save as HTML feature and will, in the process, destroy this ability to use the .docx-.htm-.docx cycle as a workaround for so many bugs/problems with corrupted Word documents.

Since Microsoft appears unable to eliminate document corruption in the files that its software produces in the first place, this worries me a lot. But for now, it appears that the .docx-.htm-.docx cycle still works as a fix, and that it actually does help alleviate Adobe InDesign’s own crappiness, in a more effective way than the various other workarounds that I had identified last year did.

Beautiful, isn’t it? I mean…

The “Format” button text tucked right against of the left edge of the button? Lovely.

The menu that pops up below the control instead of popping up on top of it, because the button text is actually the button label and not one of the pop-up menu’s options? Slick.

The top-left corner of the menu that is square when the other three corners are round? Smooth.

And the top edge of the menu that hides the bottom edge of the button? Delightful!

It’s just so pleasant to be able to use such a carefully designed piece of software.

Gives new meaning to the phrase “drawing a blank,” does it not?

Right here, it’s happening to me with the Ribbon button for changing the text colour. It started happening after I clicked on the button once and got about 30 seconds of hard disk activity with the Spinning Beach Ball of Death. And then Word 2011 drew that. And now it gives me the same thing every time I try to use this menu.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in other places in Word 2011, for example in the “Format” pop-up menu in the “Advanced Find & Replace” dialog box, in the bottom section for advanced searches. (Yes, there’s an advanced section in the advanced dialog box. When it’s hidden, the dialog box is apparently less advanced.)

I never had this problem in Word 2008.

Of course, quitting and relaunching Word 2011 will probably fix the problem, so if Microsoft bothered to even listen to their users’ feedback, they would probably file the report under “Glitches” and not do anything about it, even though expecting one’s users to quit and relaunch one’s application on a regular basis is rather rude.

The thing is, when your product has hundreds of such “glitches,” you’ve got to start asking yourself some real questions, such as: “Are we having a quality control problem here? Shouldn’t we try and do something about this?”

But Microsoft does not listen to its users (at least not ordinary Mac users like me), and will probably never do anything about any of these glitches. We Mac users have no choice but to learn to live with them — and with the new ones that appear with each new version of Word and add even more fun to the experience.

What is this, you say? It’s simple. It’s a Word document open in Word 2011 with the blinking cursor (insertion point) located before the word “staff” in the document.

And then (press Play) it’s what happens when I press the Right cursor key repeatedly to move the cursor to the right.

That’s it. That’s all I am doing. Pressing the damn Right cursor key.

Apparently, that’s enough to confuse Word 2011, which seems unable to make sure that the cursor remains visible while it is moving, so that, you know, the user can actually keep track of where he is.

Too much to ask, this is. Or rather, Microsoft’s engineers obviously believe that it’s much more fun to try and keep track of the position of an invisible cursor.

Oh yes, I do love funny distractions in my work. It makes it so much more pleasant.

Thanks, Microsoft.