I detest Microsoft Word -- all post Word 5.1 versions, anyway. Yesterday, I discovered another reason to dislike it.

Fairly frequently I receive press releases as Word attached files. The only version of Word I have installed on my PowerBook is an ancient 1993 copy of the aforementioned Word 5.1, and it doesn't support the more recent Word file formats, but I usually don't find this a problem. I just open the files in Tex Edit Plus, wich will open almost anything with text in it, copy the useful text, pasted into a new Tex Edit document, and then trash the Word file.

Which is what I did with a press release I received yesterday. Everything seemed to go normally. I did some editing of the press release, converted it to HTML, and attempted to post it to a CGI form with a browser. The CGI resolutely refused to accept it.

I tried opening the HTML document I had created in iCab on my desktop. iCab refused to open it, even though the markup in the document looked perfectly normal and properly tagged. I tried Netscape. Same thing. This was very frustrating, to say the least.

However, the fact that the original text had been pulled from a Word file, probably PC, was cause for suspicion. On a hunch, I tried opening the document in Pepper, a text editor particularly oriented toward programmers. Bingo! Instead of the neatly formatted and marked up text that appeared when I opened the file in Tex Edit, in Pepper, the title and first several sentences showed up as gibberish characters. The rest of the document looked fine.

Once I retyped the problematic lines of text, all was well, and the file posted to the CGI with no more problems.

My preference would be for PR folks to distribute news releases as plain ASCII text documents, even though with my arsenal of text manipulation applications and tools, I can usually clean up the Word formatting crud. However, this episode was especially annoying and time-consuming. I don't know why Tex Edit could display the Word adulterated text successfully, but the browsers and CGI couldn't. I'm glad I had Pepper to solve the mystery. Incidentally, doing a Google Web search for "MS Word sucks" is quite revelatory. There are a lot of frustrated, grumpy Word victims out there. You can find a particularly eloquent denunciatory Jeremiad against Word entitled, (not very originally but pointedly), "Microsoft Word Sucks," here.

A sampler:

"This bloated, pestilent gigabyte-swamping piece of ordure takes up enough computational resources to accurately model the world's weather for the next billion years, and what do you get for it? Something that will format and display text?... What you do get is a profusion of bells and whistles thrown in a careless heap, each bauble lovingly designed to make the straight path crooked, the intuitive arcane, the simple impossible."

Amen brother.

(Warning, if you are offended by coarse language, I suggest that you give that one a pass.)

For my full review of Pepper, busy here:
http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/Pepper.shtml

Charles W. Moore

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