Word Processors are stupid and inefficient, but the problems have nothing to do with including formatting options. For a one page business document, MS Word is just perfect. You need to be able to create the right formatting (bolds, headers, bullets, numbered lists) in order to get your point across at a skim.
For long documents, there is a big opening in the market.
An ideal word processor would have powerful features for organizational structure. This means drag and drop organization of chapters, subsections, and the ability to add meta-data to them—main characters, affected departments, whatever is appropriate. Color codes attached the the metadata would allow at-a-glance determinations of length, flow, etc. It would also be able to create visualizations of use of names and terms, and assess reading difficulty. The table of contents of your document should be a map that helps shape the work.
It would also need a context-sensitive thesaurus, powerful grammar tools, and revision control in the tradition of programming revision control. I should be able to cut a chapter and effortlessly bring it back in later in the manuscript two revisions later.
There are a few programs that attempt the basics of this for Mac, and nothing that I can find for Windows. Not including typesetting is just the beginning, and only necessary because it gets in the way of the rest.
Yes, for all the emphasis about separating structure and style, I think the piece misses the bigger problem: the difficulty of changing that structure while you're writing. The author says "first one types one's text and gets its logical structure right" -- but isn't getting the logical structure right actually the crux of most writing efforts? This is quite apart from the typesetting or formatting of the end result. Most word processors fail at making restructuring simple, but it's not like plaintext fares any better, especially as your project gets longer and more complex.
That's where a tool like Scrivener or Ulysses comes in, one that gives you the ability to rearrange the constituent units of your piece (paragraphs, chapters, scenes, arguments, whatever) to shape and reshape the overarching structure and logical flow. (Besides, both Scrivener and Ulysses allow you to use markup and export to LaTeX, etc., so you're not necessarily losing out on the formatting benefits.)
For long documents, there is a big opening in the market.
An ideal word processor would have powerful features for organizational structure. This means drag and drop organization of chapters, subsections, and the ability to add meta-data to them—main characters, affected departments, whatever is appropriate. Color codes attached the the metadata would allow at-a-glance determinations of length, flow, etc. It would also be able to create visualizations of use of names and terms, and assess reading difficulty. The table of contents of your document should be a map that helps shape the work.
It would also need a context-sensitive thesaurus, powerful grammar tools, and revision control in the tradition of programming revision control. I should be able to cut a chapter and effortlessly bring it back in later in the manuscript two revisions later.
There are a few programs that attempt the basics of this for Mac, and nothing that I can find for Windows. Not including typesetting is just the beginning, and only necessary because it gets in the way of the rest.