We also support "high fidelity" copy and paste, i.e., if you paste a doc from Quip into Word or similar products, it preserves all the formatting correctly. Not awesome and we will improve in subsequent updates, but it actually does most of what you'd need in the meantime.
One of the best word processing docs I have ever used was Page Maker 5.0... Everything you put into it was treated as an object. Tec: Object box. And they were extremely precisely controllable. None of the god-damned app trying to auto snap/move your stuff around.
You had a "page" which was actually just a backdrop on top of which your content object hovered - and you had very very fine control.
If you have the ability to treat each piece of content as a discrete object - and move, size and shape them precisely - that would be fantastic.
Then you might like Office Publisher. But this seems like an entirely different use case. In this case, writing/editing/collaborating is the primary purpose, and formatting and style is only there for those purposes. This is not a design tool - this is a writing tool. When I'm writing, all I want to have to do is write (I might want to do some basic formatting, but that's still within that purview). I don't want to design the document; I want to write it. It seems that this is the main purpose of Quip, as it is the main purpose of Word (despite that application being bloated and horrifically misused by many).
We also support "high fidelity" copy and paste, i.e., if you paste a doc from Quip into Word or similar products, it preserves all the formatting correctly. Not awesome and we will improve in subsequent updates, but it actually does most of what you'd need in the meantime.