Tom Smith has been having painful experiences with Word. No surprises there then.

I actually quite like Word (oops, did I really admit that in public?), but these days I find myself more and more tempted to use html + css for writing documents - either as a blog entry, or on an internal project Wiki if it’s not a public document, or even if worst comes to worst as a standalone html page.

Admittedly writing web content can be painful, and most tools are either shit or totally over-engineered for writing simple documents, but generally it isn’t too bad if you’ve got some sort of simple mark up add-on installed (e.g. Markdown).

Sorting out the basics - headings, images, lists, text styles - is easy, and I often find that the constraints imposed on me have a positive effect, leading to a simple layout, or a well structured group of pages.

What I’d love to see is for someone to do a Wiki tool which had a good client-side authoring component that ran as a standalone application.

What it should do is:

• let you author offline, using basic word processor-like wysiwyg editing
• upload your changes to the wiki later, resolving conflicts
• let you package up a group of pages as a standalone document and distribute them as a pdf so that others can read them offline
• be as fun as OmniGraffle to use :)