Translating things:
ME: "Hey dev, can you send me a xml file of strings to translate so you can impleme..."
DEV: "yea yea tomorrow"

He sent a .docx file.

i'm crying

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

Client sent "all the images needed for the website" in .docx format.

A friend of mine asked me if I could review his code. I said ok and immediately regretted it when he sent me 250 lines of .docx text. In PDF. So I couldn't even copy-paste it.

// family tech support

Dad: *Opens Microsoft Word*
Dad: *Writes stuff*
Dad: *Saves the file as "Doc1.docx" (every time)*
Dad: Son, where did I save my file? I can't find it.

When someone sends me a .docx with bugs, I feel like sending them a .js file with the fixes.

I don't understand why some developers apply for jobs with .docx format CV.

Docx is supported but pdf is not?

Just received this beauty by a customer. They "made some changes to the HTML". WTF?! Also, alongside was another docx called "printscreen.docx" with only a picture and nothing more in it. I would really like to laugh, but it would evolve into sad, depressing crying.

(Sorry for the "screenshot", but this is on a very restricted Winshit laptop we got from the company who buys our stuff.)

We have this incredible Jira system that allows anyone with half a brain to report anomalies, add some screenshots in it, a description, links, everything.

Then WHY THE FUCK would you add a fucking docx file in which there are 2 lines and one screenshot? What blocked you to add the fucking content of your docx shit to the fucking Jira?

I swear to god, some people should be medically forbidden to come close to a computer

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

Today's project was answering the question: "Can I update tables in a Microsoft Word document programmatically?"

(spoiler: YES)

My coworker got the ball rolling by showing that the docx file is just a zip archive with a bunch of XML in it.

The thing I needed to update were a pair of tables. Not knowing anything about Word's XML schema, I investigated things like:
- what tag is the table declared with?
- is the table paginated within the table?
- where is the cell background color specified?

Fortunately this wasn't too cumbersome.

For the data, CSV was the obvious choice. And I quickly confirmed that I could use OpenCSV easily within gradle.

The Word XML segments were far too verbose to put into constants, so I made a series of templates with tokens to use for replacement.

In creating the templates, I had to analyze the word xml to see what changed between cells (thankfully, very little). This then informed the design of the CSV parsing loops to make sure the dynamic stuff got injected properly.

I got my proof of concept working in less than a day. Have some more polishing to do, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results!

Online applications are so much worse than the classic snail mail ones, because some companies just don't seem to give a single fuck about the quality of their application application (hehe).

This results in such joyous things like:

• "Allowed file types: doc, docx, pdf, jpg, zip"
• "Max filesize 3mb"
• "One of your files does not meet the requirements" (doesn't tell you which)
• "Upload timed out, please try again"
• 403 forbidden
• "Your account does not have the necessary permissions to upload more than 4 files at once"
• clicking the submit button leads to a 404
• "Please explain why you want to work for us." 500 character limit
• Google forms

Customer called, said they needed help deleting some images and that they'd mail me a list.

Today I received a package with 20 A4 pages containing nothing but crossed over thumbnails.

I've seen images in .docx files attached to emails, .bmp files, pdf's and zip files with images before...

But literally mailing thumbnails, that's a first..

If only we lived in a digital age where you could capture your screen and image manipulate it later.

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

Converting a .docx to .pdf in c# is a pain in the tits.

(Without paying or using office obvs)

So a non-tech colleague just walked in and asked if it was possible to find and replace "level 1" for a star in 200 .docx files. Considering the fact docx is xml I thought it shouldn't be too hard to do this. I received her email... Including the FF-ing star as a png image! Here i thought she meant a *. Ah.. Hell no!
ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻

Applied for job. CV says I've been a web developer for over 6 years. Js included.

Recruiter doesn't read and discards me with b.s. excuse that I haven't developed with JS for more than 3 years.

I clarify that with polite email. Her boss send me an email to fill my portfolio on .docx file.

Wtf? I let it go.

Two days later they tell me I'm not responsible for doing their b.s. documentation.

How to remove the write protection on a .docx file under linux?
Well, duckduckgo has the answer.

Fuck my life! I have been given a task to extract text (with proper formatting) from Docx files.
They look good on the outside but it is absolute hell parsing these files, add to these shitty XML human error and you get a dev's worst nightmare.
I wrote a simple function to extract text written in 'heading(0-9)' paragraph style and got all sorts of shit.
One guy used a table with borders colored white to write text so that he didn't have to use tabs. It is absolute bullshit.

Me to customer: I need that image in either svg or png format.

Customer sends a zipped .docx file containing nothing but an image.

How are people writing documents/reports? Markdown/Latex in your fav editor and export to PDF? Word? Pages? Libre Office?

I use Markdown, via VSCode, Bear, iA Writer, Marked and then push to PDF. If I have to, then export to DOCX.

I swear to god, if I read another medium post on how you managed to be focused and productive I will fucking... well... roll my eyes, make a facepalm and rant about it on devRant!

Who gives a shit if I'm unproductive and unfocused?!

Well, look at me now, I'm fucking productive while I write about you, you fucking peace off shit! And guess what? I'm not even using any of your 40 todo apps or time trackers. There is no pomodoro timer next to me or framed quotes from Steve Jobs hanging on the wall. Oh, I must be a fucking genius!

But what if YOU became unproductive?
What will happen when YOU start to procrastinate?

Do you really think the world would care?

Oh, but you are not really a writer are you? you're a developer building your app!?
Well fuck, I guess you're going to change the world than?
It's your big project. Your life's work, your legacy.

Let me remind you...

All apps will be abandoned!
All blog post will be forgotten!
Productive people will die!
Focused people will die!
Enthusiastic bloggers writing about productivity will die!
All CEOs and CTOs will die!
All developers will die!
Steve Jobs is dead!
In x years, you and I will also be dead!

Whatever you do, it's not really that important!
It's really not.

You're not going to change the world.
The world doesn't need another app.
The world doesn't need your advice on how to be productive.
You are not special.

Deal with it!

I get you're a little over twice my fucking age but you still shouldn't need a step by fucking step instruction book to download and open a damn document. Especially since you do it every damn day in office. Just cause you're remote on a laptop doesn't change how shit works.

Hell I took the damn time to make your laptop as close yp your desktop as I could. And asked you to test it before you left. You didn't. At this point its just incompetent and not my problem.

Fucking hell. Half an hour on phone to open a damn .docx in word. At 48 you should be able to do this. Fuckinh hell

Some cheapskate insists on writing a guide to selfhost <software> on Heroku and wants to add it to the official documentation, promising to maintain it (since none of the other devs are using or planning to use Heroku). I volunteer to give them a chance on grounds of it being high quality and maintained by that person in the future which they both promise.
Our docs are written as markdown files on github.

So here we go:
Starts a pull request: uploads their """guide""" as a docx. The content is completely unformatted, basically just an enumerated list.

Tell them to format it as markdown, suggest using github gists.
They go ahead and copy pasta their unformatted list into a gist.txt "allright i made it into gist for ya"

Tell them that they did not format it as markdown.
"sorry updated it in markdown :P"

I look at the file, it is still raw text in a gist.txt. Maybe a bit more spaced out, not that I would care to notice any changes at this point.

Tell them it is still not markdown and link them to a perfect example of another guide that takes advantage of code fragments for commands etc and is properly rendered since it uses .md

"I updated it to the markdown this time XP Can you give me some suggestions on how it looks?"

"How it looks"... "how it LOOKS"... I click the link for the 5th time and IT IS STILL JUST A RAW FUCKING GIST.

Jfc that person has some serious reading/thinking disability. To imagine them to be proactively keeping their guide up to date in the future is absolutely impossible. At that point I pulled out my support for the request since it was already taking more effort to even get a readable version of guide than I estimated for the whole process of adding it.

Oh, and one of the steps originally suggested in the """guide""" was adding the credentials file into the vcs.

** this means words are muted **

Friday:
I send a mail the client a Google doc with elaborate details about evaluation of an Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer.

Monday:

The client is upset, he says "You say there is no GPS chip on the tablet while the manufacturer says otherwise"

Me- "I have clearly mentioned that it has a GPS chip"

Client- Opens the Google doc, points to a sentence. Looks at me like I did something horrible.

Me - **This guys is either word blind or something else is wrong with him, the line reads 'GPS chip available'**

Me- "Look, it says 'GPS chip available'.

Client- **Blinks n blinks again** "Alright, but why did you share a Google document, why not PDF, docx"

Me-**Politely** "You can download the document in any format, look I will show you..."

Client- "It should have been in the mail itself ideally"

Me- **WTH** "We normally maintain a document for such things to keep everything organised, but if you want I will put everything in mail itself"

Client- "Hmm.. do both from next time"

Me- "Alright" **BS**

Client- "Why is the new feature taking so much time"

Me- "As planned earlier, we going to deliver it tomorrow"

Client- "Why not today??" **Gives a strange look.**

Me thinking - **Enough**

Me- "See, I am trying to integrate a smarten with a socket connection, reading it's data via exposed APIs that are hardly documented, we need faster performance so I need to implement caching, multi threading, offline handling, multiple processes to avoid memory fluctuations, sync adapter to sync data...."

Client- "Ok ok ok, it's fine if you give working build tomorrow"

Me- "Ok, fine"

#limit

I would like to present new super API which I have "pleasure" to work with. Documentation (very poor written in *.docx without list of contents) says that communication is json <-> json which is not entirely true. I have to post request as x-www-form with one field which contains data encoded as json.

Response is json but they set Content-Type header as text/html and Postman didn't prettify body by default...

I'm attaching screenshot as a evidence.

I can't understand why people don't use frameworks and making other lives harder :-/

Client sends screenshots, compressed, and shrunk down to an unreadable size, inside a docx file.

Just... just no. Where is a spray bottle or a rolled up newspaper when you need one.

(For you three people who are going to comment 'why don't you just teach them...' ssssssssssshut up, some people are just unteachable ( for you other three who are going to say 'everyone is teachable.' Not true, if it was you wouldn't be saying such things.))

Hi friends and others. There is a task I want to automate. I want to convert .docx files to .pdf and then minify those. Are there JavaScript libraries or npm- packages which can do that? Because I would like to use Gulp or Webpack for this task. I would not mind if external APIs are involved, but I would rather not use those if not required.

Pls share your wisdom. Bye.

Confession: I've been installing npm packages globally using sudo for years just because I'm too lazy to set it up properly.

Client: We need to support uploading doc, docx, all image formats and PDF to convert and combine everything into a PDF.
Me: lol. No.

No way in hell am I going to try to convert docx to PDF in Java.

markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.

md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.

i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.

They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.

Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".

They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.

All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.

I hate LibreOffice. I truly despise it. I have one page with an article containing an image with a caption and on the next page is another article with some tables. I have to save it in the piece of shit Microsoft docx format, because everyone in the world uses Windows and MS Word. But everything's fine so far. Now let's try to save, close and re-open. Ok, cool, cool, cool. And what do we see? The captioned image has glitched into the next page and fucked everything up. I've tried re-saving four or five times already and it keeps glitching back into the next page in various and new ways. Fucking piece of garbage software. I hate this so much. End me and my suffering, please! I hope I never have to write documents ever again! Of course that's naive - the rest of my life will probably require a million more garbage documents. I don't want to dualboot into Windows with MS Word. I fucking hate Windows too. It's slow, it's weird, it doesn't have a normal shell (ok, there's WSL, but that doesn't count, that's just a wrapped Linux). P.S. AAAaaaaa!11A1!!

Why do people keep using .doc files? I've just downloaded a ZIP with 4 Word documents, 3 .docx and ONE .doc, what's wrong with whoever did this?

I hate my printer...
All day I was creating my CV, and I was creating it in Word from MS Office, in .docx extension...
I exported it to .pdf, it added margins, okay, I just need to live with it...
After that, I clicked `print` button in Word, so I wondered that will look the same as it was on preview before printing....but it wasn't...it looks horrible, even if I choose the black-white option, and all my work fucked up 'cuz stupid printer doesn't want to help me, fuck you my printer, I'll buy better one soon...

I just think about it ...
Running docker on windows is shit
Running nginix on windows is boofff
Running apache on windows is boofff
Running WWS on windows is hugly

Install linux
All server software run like king
Don't have access to any adobe product for design and micro$hit office for client sanity because ODF is to special, i want my docx i said ... Like what do you want from me ... Shit the dev setup is a fucking mess because some enterprises don't want to wet itself in the futur...

Microsoft love linux BULLSHIT

I'm so frickin' frustrated with school stuff right now. I have to submit all assignments as .doc or .docx files, but nothing hates me more than WYSIWYG text editors. Nothing ever works as it's supposed to and I keep thinking to myself: "If I could just submit an HTML file, this assignment would've been done already..." 😕

I hate when I just want to reference a camelCase variable or fileName.class in my .docx Word documentation and it actually bothers to try to correct me. Word is an application made by coders, I don't see why it can't figure out that I'm not wrong when I type ".toString()"

Dear colleagues, could you please recommend your preferred HTML to DOCX conversion library for PHP?

I really don't have 200$+ to spare for a library.

Taking a HCI course, our first assignment was to find and analyze an example of bad ui in software,everyday life, and anywhere else

This dude just literally did a presentation on a .docx reading off what he wrote, scrolling down from time to time

big project at uni
group of 4
collectively decide to use LaTeX to write the documentation (like 50 pages or so)
me and one team memeber (bob) had TeX experience, and decided to write a cheat sheet for the others
bob says he'll make it

fast forward a few days
bob commits and pushes a docx file called "LaTeX Cheat Sheet.docx"

... que?

Windows ffs stop shoving your fucking updates into my ass. It was prompting me to restart computer for 6 fucking hours and it never gave a fucking option to postpone the update beyond one fucking hour. So I literally kept postponing it every fucking hour and went for a shower. By the time I returned it was updating it. I had more than 25 tabs opened on incognito window of chrome and atleast 8 Microsoft office files open and editing atleast 4 of them. It fucking ruined my work flow and I don't even remember the locations of the files I was referring. Who is going to open all those tabs and files. Ffs what is wrong with you WINDOWS. I AM SO PISSED OFF AT WINDOWS AND MY UNI THAT DOESN'T FUCKING ACCEPT ASSIGNMENTS IF THEY ARE NOT IN DOCX, PPT AND OTHER MICROSHIT'S CRAPPY PRODUCTS. I AM NOT IN A MOOD TO DO THE ASSIGNMENT NOW. FUCK WINDOWS. I SWER BY THE Old GODS AND THE NEW THAT I WILL CONTRIBUTE TO WINE IN THE NEXT 5 TO 6 MONTHS SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO USE WINDOWS AGAIN.

I've spent the whole day writing editing a proposal a partner sent as docx. I've tested out writing revisions and saved the file to be sure, and I could re-open it just fine. After some hours, I've sent the file to the partner and he said he couldn't open it. Looks like Libreoffice broke the document.xml file beyond repair when I edited my last comments. Will need to work until midnight because this piece of shit software is incapable of handling the basic document structure it is written for. IF YOU SUPPORT DOCX FILES HOW ABOUT YOUR RELEASE VERSIONS DONT LEAVE BROKEN CORRUPTED MESSES YOU PIECE OF SHIT. HOW MANY HOURS DO YOU THINK HAVE YOU COLLECTIVELY WASTED??

Code examples with dozen of lines in the project documentation (docx) are screenshots... lazy to format or to prevent simple copy and paste? That's the question.

!rant
So, I wanted a little suggestion here.
I'm currently interning at a startup and currently we document our build procedures by creating .docx files containing the steps. But docx is a pain in the ass. I'd rather prefer markdown for documentation.
Are there any better tools for documenting? What do you guys use?

We're using Jira for project management bdw.