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1. Embed this notice
   Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:33:07 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

   Currently witnessing a hard-fought battle between Microsoft Word and Westlaw to see which one can take advantage of this modern supercomputer to operate in the most inefficient and cumbersome way possible

   • Embed this notice
     Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:42 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @SteveBellovin @mattblaze @coreyrayburnyung @paulgowder Microsoft’s best security practice is making sure that it’s basically impossible to share your file even on purpose

   • Embed this notice
     Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:44 JST Steve Bellovin

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @blakereid @mattblaze @coreyrayburnyung @paulgowder I have one article I’m using OneDrive with. Getting it working has not been among my happiest experiences…

     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:46 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @mattblaze @coreyrayburnyung @paulgowder @SteveBellovin it’s actually pretty good now with Teams integration, if (big if) you can manage all the invocations to set up permissions in Microsoft’s virtual embodiment of a Kafka novel

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:47 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @blakereid @coreyrayburnyung @paulgowder @SteveBellovin Yeah. I can generally live with almost all the other things I dislike about Word, but the lack of sane support for multiple simultaneous authors working on different sections is a show stopper.

   • Embed this notice
     Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:49 JST Steve Bellovin

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @coreyrayburnyung @blakereid @mattblaze @paulgowder The inability to easily split documents into multiple files is very high on my list of Why I Hate Word.

   • Embed this notice
     Corey Rayburn Yung (coreyrayburnyung@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:52 JST Corey Rayburn Yung

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder

     @SteveBellovin @blakereid @mattblaze @paulgowder
     That's one of the reasons that splitting a document into multiple files works better (they all appear as one workspace with links on the side to click on specific files). When you use pandoc and combine the documents, all of the footnotes are renumbered appropriately and appear as they normally would.
     On the upside for Markdown, auto-completion, brought from the coding world, makes using Zotero even easier. 2/

   • Embed this notice
     Corey Rayburn Yung (coreyrayburnyung@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:54 JST Corey Rayburn Yung

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder

     @SteveBellovin @blakereid @mattblaze @paulgowder With plugins, footnotes work pretty well and are easier in some ways. These are the Zotero plug-ins (which work with Juris-M) that I use with VS Code:
     https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mblode.zotero
     https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=notZaki.pandocciter
     https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rubenvandeven.zoterolens

     The biggest shortcoming, imho, is that Markdown doesn't have document footers. So, footnotes appear as endnotes in the document until you convert the document. That's not too big of a deal, though. 1/

   • Embed this notice
     Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:55 JST Steve Bellovin

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @coreyrayburnyung @blakereid @mattblaze @paulgowder So what is the proper way to use Juris-M with Markdown? (And I'd think that inconvenient footnotes would be a show-stopper for law review articles…)

   • Embed this notice
     Corey Rayburn Yung (coreyrayburnyung@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:56 JST Corey Rayburn Yung

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder

     @blakereid @SteveBellovin @mattblaze @paulgowder Did I mention that the Zotero plugins work better w/ Markdown than Word? 😉
     The two big differences between Markdown and all the rest, though, are that it has a very small learning curve and there are some elegant interfaces.

   • Embed this notice
     Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:32:58 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin
     • Paul Gowder
     • Corey Rayburn Yung

     @coreyrayburnyung @SteveBellovin @mattblaze aw man I knew the Markdown people were gonna show up. Next thing you know the Zotero truthers will be here (*cough*@paulgowder*cough*)

   • Embed this notice
     Corey Rayburn Yung (coreyrayburnyung@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:33:00 JST Corey Rayburn Yung

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Steve Bellovin

     @SteveBellovin @blakereid @mattblaze I've switched over to using Markdown for writing and it's working surprisingly well. I use VS Code for drafting (Zettlr is also pretty good) and Pandoc for conversion. I'm working on a Python package for the automatic, simple, dynamic assembly of books or law review articles from multiple markdown files after having too much trouble with Quarto. I still use Word when I get a file already in that format. But my original writing is all in Markdown.

   • Embed this notice
     Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:33:01 JST Steve Bellovin

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze

     @blakereid I have Word open at this very minute, for the same reason (given your mention of Westlaw) as you: I'm working on some law review articles. Now, I'm not happy with Word (when doing some articles with @mattblaze and Susan Landau, all of our calls started with a 2-minute hate towards Word), but necessity is necessity. For my CS writing, of course, I use (shall we say) other platforms, for things up to and including typesetting books.

   • Embed this notice
     Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:33:03 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

     in reply to

     • Steve Bellovin

     Also since @SteveBellovin is here I'm compelled to note that the same goes for "Emacs,” "VI,” or “LaTeX.”

   • Embed this notice
     Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:33:04 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

     in reply to

     Also since this is Mastodon I am compelled to remind folks that any responses including the term "LibreOffice" will be automatically hurled into the sun

   • Embed this notice
     Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)'s status on Thursday, 25-May-2023 10:33:06 JST Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁

     in reply to

     I would really love it if #Microsoft devoted fewer resources to frivolous deployments of #AI technology and more to overhauling the Word codebase so that it doesn't bring a modern M-series Mac to its knees just by opening a quarter-meg text document with track changes turned on. Every breathless article about Microsoft and Google and chatbots should open and close by observing that generative AI could never do as much damage to writers as decades of garbage functionality in Word and Google Docs.