It's Time to Bring Word Processing Out of the Dark Ages: A Position Paper

This paper presents a view that word processing (and document authoring in general) today is very inefficient, and that this problem is mainly due to inadequately designed software whose approach reflects too much on its historical development, showing little consideration for HCI principles and how users actually interact with it. A number of profound improvements are proposed, which aim to offer the reader a fresh look at how document authoring systems of the future could function. In Part 1, three main types of document authoring packages are analysed; word processors, DTP packages and LATEX; and suggestions are proposed to reunite the benefits of all three.