Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union.
As a student I would love if this resulted in more software portability in education spaces. As it stands, half the classes I take only want Microsoft proprietary formats (docx pptx etc), which results in me having to use a giant nasty WYSIWYG editor that supports those formats like LibreOffice instead my preferred tooling (heirloom-doctools / troff, mandoc, or even better, plain text). At least some classes support PDFs, but I’ve yet to see a class that takes plain text submissions. Formatting documents wastes so much time and data for no real reason.
Formatting text/data is about as important as punctuation etc., if not more so.
I disagree, if only for the reason that you can’t easily and more importantly reliably convert document formats to plain text. On the other hand, there are plenty of good tools to convert plain text to printable formats (like pr from POSIX).
Why is the ability to convert files relevant for the relevance of formatting text? Which is important on paper (pencil) too, which can not be converted to something else.
Why is the ability to convert files relevant for the relevance of formatting text?
If my professor wants a double-spaced document with Times New Roman in 12 point font and 1 inch margins, that’s very easy to do with a plain text file as input (They can load a template with all their defaults in their WYSIWYG editor and paste my text in). If I, as a user, want to convert a formatted document back to plain text to read/edit it (which I prefer), this is unreliable, and can lead to malformed output, especially with proprietary formats like docx that contain images; or flat out impossible with other proprietary formats.
I don’t think there was a time when formatting wasn’t important.
From double spaced text to allow edits, to certain margins, to sectioning, to indexes, to appendices, to properly italicized bibliographical references, to page references etc.
It assists you in conveying your intent as the writer and if standardized it makes it easier for the reader (ie your teacher) to orient themselves with minimal effort. Similar to having a consistent user interface.
Well student like you starts learning how real life world works. Not everything has to go as you wish.
