What Part of WYSIWYG Doesn't MS Understand?

I'm old enough to remember when the Mac was first released. The most amazing, splendid thing about it was that what you saw on the screen of your computer in 1984 was pretty much exactly what your printer spat out. Never mind that you had to wait a week for an Imagewriter to grind its way through a 10 page document. There were no formatting codes to screw up, no guessing at how monochrome amber monospace text would look when you issued the print command. On the Mac, what you saw on the tiny black and white screen was what you saw on the printed page. That was a revelation. It created a bridge between digital and physical versions of a document. It gave me control and confidence and, best of all, it eliminated hours of farting around trying to get a document to appear the way it should be.

Leave it to Word to bring us back to 1983 and guessing at how print-outs will appear. Today, I printed out a longish (30+ pages) document that I needed to review in detail. To my dismay, Word scaled down each page to about 60% of it's "real" size and shoved it into the upper, left-hand corner of the sheet. Lucky for me (if you count constant exposure to shoddiness "lucky"), I knew what the problem was. Sure enough, the author of the document had left "track changes" turned on. When I opened the document, something changed, possibly there was a slight difference in a font size or something which caused Word to repaginate and then add a helpful comment. That one little comment box caused Word to scale down every page of the print-out so that the comment would have room.

This, of course, completely violates the fundamental Mac wysiwyg principle. On screen, Word makes the sheet wider to accommodate comments (this trips me up sometimes when I wonder why my "centered" paragraph isn't in the center of the sheet). In print, Word scales down the document to make room for the comments, a truly moronic solution to a problem of its own creation. Why don't I get an easy-to-find option to print comments or not? Why can't comments and changes be an overlay that DOESN'T CHANGE THE LAYOUT OF THE DOCUMENT? I'm YELLING because I wonder what percentage of deforestation can be attributed directly to MS's brain-dead print implementations? Could this particular UI failure actually be contributing to global warming? Probably no more so than Bill's giant lake-side McMansion, but still...