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Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat
Personally, when the PC revolution got underway, I bought an Apple IIe soon after its introduction. VisiCalc caught my eye. As did Flight Simulator, and going online with a 300-baud modem to local computer bulletin boards. But when it came to writing -- in those days, three drafts of a first novel -- I would not abandon my trusty Hermes portable typewriter. The Apple would not tempt me to some writing Eden. The complexity of computers, I sensed, could only sap the creative process.
This reluctance to mix computers with writing ended abruptly in 1988: I began writing professionally. At different writing jobs, I made use of whatever hardware/software combo the employer had. I fashioned text with PCs, Macs, Sun workstations, and still deemed any personal writing project at night better suited to the beloved Hermes.
I soon realized storing words on electronic media meant the professional wordsmith also did "desktop publishing." I had to worry about font selection, repagination, stylesheets. I wondered when I'd have time to find the right word, the original phrase. Once, while "writing" a software manual, I commented that I'd spent far more time formatting than actually writing. That comment went unanswered. I had a sure sense I needed to make an adjustment to new priorities.
Still, I couldn't shake the idea something was being lost when writers got embroiled in desktop publishing. After five years, I gave up the software manuals, the marketing newsletters, to refocus on personal writing. And for the first time, I thought about moving my writing to that Apple IIe. I hesitated. The monitor was filled with text glowing green on a black background. Would those green emissions overwhelm my inner eye of imagination, unlike a piece of paper sitting in a typewriter? I decided to take the plunge and see.
Maybe I looked sideways when I visualized a story scene. I soon found the Apple IIe gave efficiency analogous to replacing handwriting with typewriting. I only retyped what I needed in successive drafts. Counting words was a snap. And, thankfully, Apple IIe word processing was primitive: more a typewriter with memory, not a desktop publishing system. On balance, a good tool. Before long, I was publishing short stories to the World Wide Web.
But by 1999, living with an Apple IIe was Neanderthal. So despite 15+ years of service, I upgraded to an IBM ThinkPad laptop. I was attracted by portability, the renowned IBM keyboard touch, and a promised multimedia experience of the World Wide Web. As for writing, I would use the full-bodied word processor that came with the ThinkPad. This I accepted as a tradeoff for new PC technology. I gave it a go and lived with a plethora of pull-down menus within pull-down menus. I endured help balloons that appeared without bidding. To keep writing, I resisted becoming expert with all my word processor could do.
This strategy of limits on learning worked but briefly. In months, I was driven to maddening distraction with features I thought I'd accidentally turned on and wouldn't, in a blue moon, set right. Gems like capitalization on autopilot. But what really called for a decision was discovery of quotation marks in the wrong font spread randomly throughout a book-length file (and a pair of left quotation marks at that!).
Moreover, the ThinkPad's operating system, Windows 98, caused me to yearn for the stability of an Apple IIe (if not a Sun workstation). I thought about Linux--the alternative to Windows (unless one buys a new computer and goes Macintosh). But in a serendipitous experiment, I installed the very alternative BeOS on the ThinkPad. As operating systems go, it was a vision of loveliness. Scot Hacker, author of THE BEOS BIBLE, aptly described BeOS as combining "the grace of a Mac and the power of Unix."
The productivity suite I bought for BeOS had a "less is more" flavor and the word processor, in particular, worked well. I wrote a novel without struggle. But too often I tackled the day's writing deciding such issues as a font for the day's draft. The point being, I still had too many choices, compared to my beloved Apple IIe. When I finished the 76,000-word manuscript, I found a disconcerting bug in my otherwise dependable word processor. It repeated words, on occasion, in the text. Admittedly, a dozen "doubles" among tens of thousands of words isn't a big deal, but I wondered if my writing might benefit from even less computer functionality. Did those font choices have a price?
With a new novel to write, the time seemed ripe to switch software. I'd like to say I scoured about for word processors, but I didn't. In my novel, one character would write computer programs. The story question was, What software would he use? It had to be vi. Vi, a Unix editor for plain text files created in 1976 by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. I'd remembered working with a software engineer, who saw no advantage to word processors and dismissed the "prettiness" of desktop publishing. He did everything in vi. Could I write a novel in vi? I decided, Why not?
Vi fast became -- and remains, 100,000 words later -- my writing implement of choice. Most of all, what I like about vi is something that is, well, aesthetic. I like vi's keyboard-only operation. Vi doesn't assault with helpful balloons or racks of toolbar icons. No, vi has a 70s ambience (no mouse, no GUI) that's refreshingly clean. In that sense, vi is a treasured software servant. It works well without showy presence and respectfully stays out of the way.
Sure, vi is only a digitized window on the ThinkPad screen. But, at times, I can almost imagine another sheet of paper filling up with words, not unlike one I rolled into my Hermes typewriter. That's when vi, the minimalist's text editor, lets the words roll freely, as with Hemingway's carpenter pencil, from my fingertips.
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VI VS. EMACS
Right after the tractor pull and the monster truck races!!
Having started with Wordstar under CP/M on an Apple ][+ in ~1981 or 82, I found Joe to be just what I was looking for. If I want a graphical editor on a Unix-like system, NEdit is the only thing I use (I have it configured to highlight/italicize/colourize keywords and other goo in Cisco PIX config files).
It's graphical, yes, but otherwise quite lightweight and responsive. Of course a good working knowledge of vi is useful as it's pretty much the lowest common denominator on any Unix-like system.
Pico? Begone, infidel!
Trolling is a art,
in a presentation in Australia to the Press Club, Scott McNeally stated: "When the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their callipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."
While this view maybe considered extreme, the author of the article certainly casts some doubt on the usefulness of complex word processing software. But then, I would not call vi particularly intuitive, but it does cut down on pointless formatting decisions that seem to endlessly arise.
Salon has a pretty good story on XyWrite, the old DOS word processor which is apparently a favorite among a lot of writers. If you want to play around with it, you can build a "XyLite" system with a little work. Also check out the XyWWWeb, an excellent resource for XyWrite related stuff.
Sure that plays well on slashdot, but most writers looking for a typewriter-with-memory would be better served by Notepad or the Mac equivalent. (Does OSX still have TextEdit?)
:)
How many writers know what a regular expression IS, let alone how to search with one?
I know 3 novel writers and many script writers...
and they all completely despise Microsoft Word and Open Office.
some of them even have nasty words to describe both of those products..
basically the jist of all their gripes is the damned "features" you cannot turn off or get in the way, both apps (word and Open Office) are written for childish minds as one of them put it... "any word processor that does anything you did not specifically ask for is a complete piece of crap" (referring to microsoft word.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
vi has a 70s ambience (no mouse, no GUI) that's refreshingly clean.
So does edlin. Come on, get real. The only benefit of vi is that it's available on a most unix-like systems, so you can quickly hack something together if you're in a hurry, Anything more, and you're going to need a REAL editor.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
I met him at a writers conference in the outskirts of Detroit. He presented a small essay about the life of the borgeouis class in late 19th century Germany which many people found fascinating. But what astounded me, and I'm not usually that superficial, is how even though he had a pronounced lisp he was one of the most captivating speakers in the seminar.
I spoke to him the following and explained to him that he was one of my main writing influences. I think I mildly embarassed him since he seemed to lost for words.
Great chap and an excellent writer.
Which is nice.
...can be mixed with computers. Does anyone know where I can find some more hallucinogenic mushrooms? I've recently run out.
I've written two books, a computer-based-training video script (and text), and more than a few LDP HOWTOs using only vi. Keep sections of text small, use something like DocBook to tie it all together and make it look pretty in the end.
"I'm told there are better programs [than WordStar], but I'm also told there are better alphabets." --William F. Buckley Jr.
This is a darn old quote; I've no idea what he's running these days.
It is truly amazing how important the simple act of writing really is. Nearly every form of education, entertainment, business and reference is totally dependent on letters, words and sentences.
In the face of $100 million motion picture budgets and teams of hundreds building video games, the words of another author remain quite profound:
"With words alone, I have an unlimited special effects budget."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I would not call vi particularly intuitive, but it does cut down on pointless formatting decisions that seem to endlessly arise.
Yes, and Paint cuts down on pointless design decisions that seem to arise from crap like Photoshop. Get real please.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
I love using Microsoft Word on my Mac to write my books. It has a certain feel to it that is very comfortable.
Personally, I've been a fan of Textpad for years, and it's one of the few pieces of shareware that I actually bought. Light, fast, with incredicle search and replace (even regular expressions). I use it for the few documents I write, and any coding that I might do.
It's a common complaint from writers - The computer gets in their way asking for irrelevent decisions.
HTML got it right in this respect. HTML doesn't encourage you to select a font, or a size or anything. You can if you want, but if you ignore the problem, you end up with a perfectly reasonable default. It does however, have advantages over a plain text editor - It allows these things if you want them. vi will not give you a variable width font, bold or italics, or headings. These are often useful. The actual details are left to the reader.
I sympathize with the author's complaint about the "writing with a computer" experience. I don't have that degree of trouble with software packages, but I have long since learned that if I wish to write anything, it is better for me to set up a separate machine with no distractions on it for that purpose. The good thing is that if you really only want to do word processing in a fairly limited sense, you can use a very old machine. This beats my old system of typing everything the first time on an antique typewriter from the 40's, and then editing via the transfer to an electronic medium. That old typewriter was hell to lug around, Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing style, but it had a satisfying clunk when the keys were pressed.
-1, "1337" speak
I remain firmly convinced that the combination of a powerful editor and Plain TeX cannot be beat.
The problem, though, is that nowadays publishers more and more demand manuscripts in the form of M$ Word files, which frankly sucks. I am measurably less productive under Word than I am with the combination of (editor + Plain TeX), and I suspect that the same would be true of most authors who are technically competent.
Not at all at the level of "real" wordsmithing, but I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in Vi (Vim, to be exact) using LaTeX. Same goes for all papers and other 'professional' text generation.
What a word processor does well, on the other hand, are short documents that are due to be printed and consumed immediately, such as letters, applications and so on. For such stuff, you can't really separate content creation and formatting anymore, and LaTeX becomes too heavyweight to deal with it. Of course, with that focus for wordprocessing, 95% of all features are absolutely worthless.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I like to write my first drafts in pencil and paper. I use a 0.5mm #2 Pentel pencil, a Magic Rub eraser, and college-ruled paper. Subsequent drafts are typically on PC, in whatever format--usually .DOC format, since I primarily use Windows at home. I spent a half hour configuring the normal.dot template the way I wanted it, and I was off and running.
I recall listening to Harlan Ellison describe why he uses typewriters--such "features" as having to rewrite the entire page when you make mistakes, etc.. But that does help with the writing process, at least in my opinion: the more you write and re-write a story, after all, the more familiar you are with it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
You can tell this person has a penchant for writing. I found this article quite mesmeriseing, In fact I read it several times as his words drifted off the screen with ease.
;)
...
I wish we had more stuff like this on Slashdot.
I choose Vi myself, if its any consolation
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
It's a simple, unobtrusive interface that allows me to type for hours on end in almost any location using a fold up keyboard. No internet distractions, or complex formating to deal with ( woudn't look right on a desktop anyways ). I can then come back to my PC and do the editing required before printing or emailing the document to others.
I've seen many people start to do the same thing too, the only ones that have a real problem are the poetry writiers because of the very narrow screens.
I have also grown quite fond of eBooks on PDA as well. Using auto-scroll to keep my eyes moving I can get quite a bit more read, and there is no problem reading at night.
with index finger clicker is my weapon of choice, although I use Kwrite (What? Not Emacs/VI? Let the flammage ensue but direct your shrapnel away from the top of my head.) for producing a final draft.
While words cannot express the beauty of discovering the frequency of Sol-type stars within 100 light-years of Earth, or Tibetan surnames and their construction without visiting a library, computers (and especially the internet) are a godawful distraction to creativity.
Like now.
And Jerry Pournelle successfully campaigned to have Microsoft add an option to Word just for him. Which one?
[] Blue background, white text
That option is still there to this day.
Dang, it must be nice to be able to tell Bill Gates what to do once in a while!
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Maybe these tools aren't "simple" but back when I did a heck of a lot more writing than I do now (term papers, software documentation, etc) I used Emacs and LaTeX exclusively.
I found that combination to be the easiest to use.
When I bought my first computer, I also made the mistake of buying an early version of MS Word (1.4, IIRC); I've hated that product ever since. Every iteration gets more and more "helpful" and less and less useful.
Pierre
Okay, maybe the classic version of vi is (which I have written tens of thousands of lines of code with), but not the more recent incarnations like vim. Surem vim doesn't have help balloons and all that, but you'll still spend the next five years figuring out everything there is. If you're the kind of person who loves to fiddle with fonts and colors and settings, then vim is like crack. You'll kill even more time configuring vim than most GUI editors because it's all so byzantine.
Realistically, if you want straightforward and simple, just use one of the many Notepad-like editors. Notepad is too simplistic, but there are many free, enhanced versions (like EditPad Lite). You still don't have to worry about fonts and help balloons and automatic reformatting, but something like EditPad Lite (or EditPlus) is much less invisible to use than vi.
Tom Robbins had problems with a IBM Selectric in Still Life with Woodpecker, so it's possible for a writer to have problems with any word processor no matter how well designed it is.
I write with Ultra Edit, & can vouch for the complete lack of distraction that the minimalist editor provides. Instead of emphasizing your prose with underlining, italics, boldface, etc., you throw your readers against the wall by better word choices, more dynamic phrasing, and edgier dialogue. It's also just plain easier to concentrate, when you're not thinking about how a program must be used. Anything else is for sissies.
I have a degree in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. You know what I do? I write first, format later, and you know what? It works! It's called time management.
Furthermore, it's not tough to select Courier, 10pt., set the margin widths to 1.25" all the way around, and set the material to double-spacing. That's all that's really required.
blog |
Creative people seem to be among the most resistant to new technologies and/or meduims brought about by technology. The word processor is just one example...but how long did it take photography to be accepted as a fine art? (I'm sure that there are photographers out there right now that will argue that it still hasn't).
A large fraction of those same photographers who are shaking their heads right now -- they refuse to accept digital photography as an artistic medium. Furthermore, much of the other digital "art" mediums have yet to be accepted...what about 3D rendering? This is surely an art form, but is not widely accepted. The demo scene is another that is not embraced by the artsy world.
The point is that the artistic types will tend to cling to their ways...who knows why. But it doesn't seem like, as a group, creative folks tend to enbrace new technology (or in this case a pretty damn old one, like a word processor) I wonder if it's alright to use an electric light Vs. a candle to write?
-Turkey
I can imagine people appreciate a tool like vi, or notepad for that matter, that has few features and is more or less keyboard-driven. Myself, I use editplus to bang out lots of text for reports, memos and the like... which means I do not have to worry about formatting and such. When I am reaonably happy with the text, I paste it into Word and apply a template and formatting.
But for the more creative writing I still prefer a notepad and pencil for the first draft. I can easily annotate, make drawings, cross out stuff and then decide I want to keep that text after all... and there's just no computer tool that is as easy to use. I find that both the features and the inherent limitations get in the way of creativity.
The drawback of course is that I have to type it ito the computer anyway, at some point.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Despite being on my computer for 4+ hours a day, I find that I rely on the old steadfasts for my writing; that is, when I want to compile some serious literature, I go out back and piss on the driveway.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I think most computer users went through, or will go through, a similar journey when they first start using a computer where they used to use paper and a pencil, pen, or typewriter.
... "lite" mode or something. Sure, you can do it yourself by turning off spell/grammar checking, etc., but it'd be nice if a single, built-in action could do it all for you...
The key as the author points out is to totally forget about presentation when you're *trying* to focus on content. That's why vi is better than Word when you're just trying to get ideas out and organized, why many of us prefer Notepad to FrontPage, etc.
It's similar to why teachers insist on writing drafts for essays -- get it OUT first, then get it organized, clean, etc. Similarly, get the content out first, THEN use a tool like Word to get it organized and presentable.
Tools like Word won't go away -- there will always be a need for ways to make documents that combine, organize, and display content. But I'm not sure even Microsoft claims it's necessarily the right choice for initially capturing creative content.
Having said that, it'd be nice if modern, abounding-with-features tools like Wordhad a
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
It works great on an 8086 class PC. There's even a Palm version.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Metapad is an excellent, free, plain text editor for Windows that can seamlessly replace Notepad. Handy for editing html source code ...
Once, while "writing" a software manual, I commented that I'd spent far more time formatting than actually writing. That comment went unanswered. I had a sure sense I needed to make an adjustment to new priorities.
I'd recommend writing the raw text first and then formatting later. I've written several lengthy user manuals. The first thing I write is a table of contents. This can be done in a program as simple as NotePad (although I like EditPlus).
Then, fill out each section. Write the content. Trying to format on the fly with something like MSWord is a major pain in the ass (don't even get me STARTED on what a nightmare subdocuments can be). Plus, you end up wasting a lot of time.
I must confess to enjoying the feel of fresh pen on paper. And I have printed countless copies of nearly identical sections of writing, just so that my pen can run across the paper. Of course, when visceral pleasure runs out, practicality must take over, and it's easier to manage a large digital collection of scraps than a large pile of scrap paper. And so I have turned to DevonThink, a mac-only program that I am thrilled with. It makes it terrifically simple to edit many little scraps, and organize them into useful groupings. I will always relish the pen, but when work needs done, DevonThink does the trick.
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to do it by not dying." -Woody Allen
My 70yo dad loves it and so do i, best text editor on a windows platform ever (and it runs in WINE too
www.textpad.com
Artistic folk don't like to change their ways too often. Familiarity helps them create. Many writers/artists force themselves into a daily ritual that they adhere to rigorously. They must begin their day at a certain time at a certain location with the same damn fern and mechanical pencil they used in college. It's purely psychological.
Technically inclined people are always looking for better ways to get something done. That isn't to say tech people can't get set in their ways. (People are still using their Amiga?)
for all my novels. Sometimes I even write in rot13 code just for fun.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
A friend was once writing a fairly lengthy document with pen and paper while sitting on my couch during one of his stays in town. He had brought his laptop with him, so I asked why he wasn't using it. He explained that it was too easy to spend a lot of time editing and second-guessing instead of writing. So he did his initial drafts and main revisions on paper first, then put it into a wp for final tweaking and output.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
The last time I stepped into my mom's office (she's a lawyer btw) and still found people there using Wordperfect 5.1/DOS. Whatever works for your purpose, as my mom tells me "It does legal briefs better than anything else that I know how to use, so why change?" Why should authors use the latest version of MS Word or Vi, or Emacs or anything?
Once people have found a comfortable niche in technology, why change until you have better needs?
...in bed
Years of developing software brought me to XEmacs, which is just a subtle variant from FSF's/Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs. Functionally they're, for most practical purposes, identical. Like Emacs, XEmacs has got a learning curve like an Olympic ski jump and it takes a good long while (months) before you're very productive with it. But I can do just about everything with it that I do on a computer: email, programming, Usenet, personal information management (including scheduling and a contact database), screenplay formatting, XML, even ASCII drawing with Emacs' picture-mode.
In short, it's legendary, and probably most everyone here has heard of it. But for those who haven't, and who have a penchant for twiddling and fiddling with software that has about ten thousand options and endless opportunities for customization (gotta learn elisp, a lisp variant, to do it), then I highly, highly recommend XEmacs or, if you want to be a free software purist, go with GNU Emacs, but you'll have to download the source for the moment because last I checked the GNU ftp servers were still recovering from an exploit and trying to gather checksums for potentially compromised software. Yikes!
As far as my writing habits go, it's been enormously convenient for me to apply the quick navigational keystrokes I've learned for Emacs to my writing projects. Everything just becomes so much faster and intuitive. And doing most everything from one customizable editor allows me to create an environment that I understand from my own personal viewpoint without having to learn a slew of special features and keystrokes from other software packages.
Emacs isn't for everyone, I will say that. And since learning many software packages for special purposes -- one for HTML editing, one for XML (like XMLSpy), one for screenplay formatting (like Movie Magic Screenwriter) -- isn't exactly a trial given that it seems like most people's brains seem to adjust to whatever "mode" of work they're currently engaged in, many will choose that route. But again, if you feel so inclined, give Emacs a try, you might grow to love it. But be prepared to give it time.
Oh, and there's always Vim. It's an excellent, ultra-powerful editor that's basically for people that wished they could grok Emacs but, for some sad reason, simply can't.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I do automotive systems engineering. So I have to analyze all the systems of a particular vehicle. Eventually I will present modified improved versions in schematic form.
I find it much more helpful to initially draw schematics by hand. Freehand, not drafting style. This helps me to cache the systems implementations in my head. While drawing them in TurboCAD or Visio is pretty, it also distracts from the details. I have to think about the Tool to some degree. Also, I have to sit virtually shiftless for hours while I draw them.
Hand and paper I find is much more relaxing and beneficial to the overall objective of understanding what I am doing (and not zoning out into autopilot.)
masochist? I new that you could . . .
The article above surprises me, mainly because vi is so difficult to learn. Having once learned it, it's not a half bad editor, but there are better ones that are easier to learn. After all, vi was designed to take advantage of the (then) increasingly ubiquitous terminals with addressable cursors, connected at serial rates between 600 and 9600 bps. Most had only the keys found on a typewriter, with no function keys, arrow keys, or numeric keypad, and certainly no mouse. That made the keyboard-only, modal interface necessary.
With today's PCs, there are so many better choices out there, that it's surprising that vi retains any following at all. But what can I say, I still use it myself.
I can't be fucking bothered to read all that. This story sucks.
I'm a writer. I'm published. I've gotten good reviews. But here's the thing:
I can't write freehand. I can't think at the paltry speed of a pencil or obsolecent ink pen. My ideas move too fast for that, and if I have to wait for my hand to catch up, they're gone.
To imagine that a computer would sap the creative process is incredible to me. How could speed and ease of revision sap the speed of your mind? But no, not to the average writer. If they're not scratching it in a journal, or onto a dirty napkin, the idea lacks pathos and originality.
The day when someone comes up with a method that allows me to move beyond the speed of my fingers or my voice, something that lets me chain my imagination to a digital muse, to move my thoughts straight to the page with no cluttered interface, then I'll be happy.
And all over the world, pretentious english majors will be whining about how that removes the essential purity of whatever level of technology they've managed to be able to accept. The greek epic poets probably screamed bloody murder when their contemporaries started writing things down to begin with.
God! I'm so tired of it! I don't care what you use to write! Just please! please! PLEASE! STOP TELLING ME ABOUT IT! I don't care! There's nothing holy about your grubby paper notebook, there's nothing pure about your ancient typewriter, and there is nothing worthy about your ancient appleII except the fact that you're too stupid to use anything NEWER!
Just my (unfortunately well researched) opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You would think Charles Dickens could have come up with a less obvious pseudonym when submitting the article.
Howard is the only science fiction writer I know who doesn't even own a computer. (I think even Gene Wolfe finally bought one.) He uses a pencil. As Howard is wont to say, "Whenever my word processor crashes, I just sharpen it up again!"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Son, put down the game pad already and go git yerself sum schoolin afore itz two late.
write direct to .eps
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
as a burgeoning writer myself, i find no other writing tool as functional as vi (well, vim, in my case). it's fast, it's simple, and as mr dickinson reports, it removes all the esoterica from modern desktop publishing and leaves you peacefully with the transference of ideas from brain to keyboard.
word processors are for resumes.
You weren't intended to "format" your writing at the same time as you wrote it, at least for a large part. Format things -after- you're done writing, if you find you tinker too much with formatting to get it "just right".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Anyone want to add color syntax highlighting to Joe? The author made a comment on a newsgroup or list about doing exactly that -- something like 8 years ago. I really like this editor, but the lack of color is finally driving me away. I've got a list of half-done projects three pages long, so I'm not going to add this to that, but if anyone implements this in Joe, I'll buy you a beer. Or non-alcoholic beverage of your choice.
I used to be rather prolific...enjoyed writing and all that. Even when I had to write grant requests and such...
Then WordPerfect went to 6.0. I configured it to look a *lot* like 5.1 -- still lotsa joy.
Then MSWord became the defacto format...which is when I started looking at other OSes because, well, I *hated* MSWord. But WP couldn't keep up. I eventually landed at Linux and had the corresponding version of WP. Then Corel bought it, then MS bought/ran/abused Corel.
I've been switching between gedit/abiword/OOOrg since and haven't been able to get the same...zen...as I used to with WordPerfect.
And, y'know, I think my desire to write has decreased as a result...
I do some writing for fun and enjoyment. I've written a few thousand pages of anime fanfiction, original fiction, essays, rants, etc.
I prefer TextPad on Windows and have used BBEdit on Macs. I used to use Super NoteTab on PC, but I moved to TextPad for a few of its features.
I will not use a word processor for my writing. Period. I will not choose a font. I will not use 'styles' until I'm finished and want to convert my work to stylized text for a web page. I do not want tables. I do not want headers and footers. I do not want 'assistants'. I loathe, I loathe, I loathe autoreplace features! If I wanted a fucking long dash rather than two hyphens, I wouldn't have typed in the two hyphens, would I?
I really loathe vi's 'modal' text entry and prefer the ability to drag text around with a mouse. I like soft-wrapping, but it's not essential. I like spell-checking, but hate the underlining features of Word that check spelling and grammar. Yeah, I know that sentance isn't formed correctly. I took high-school English. Quit bothering me, dammit!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I write everything in vi, including dissertations, theses, technical journal publications, reports, stage plays, screen plays, and short stories (no books yet).
The key (for me) is to use LaTeX as a markup language. It is available for windows, Mac, and Linux and for non-table non-equation oriented work is trivial to learn. Equations and tables aren't particularly hard either, quicker (assuming you type quickly) than MS Word equation mechanisms. Plus it handles all your typesetting for you. I actually use pdflatex which generates nice pdf files.
Ten years from now, all my work will be in ascii text still, and wether or not LaTeX exists at that time, all I need is a text editor to view my work!
About a year and a half ago, I decided I wanted to host my own web site, on my own equipment running Linux. The experiment was to teach myself more about Linux - more than the occasional use of Red Hat that I had come to equate with the "Linux experience". When it came time to decide which tool it was that I was going to fashion my site with, I decided to continue my self teaching and write the site from scratch using only vi. By writing it from scratch, I would be forced to write better code and to learn how to use a powerful editor - which was the point of the whole expierment in the first place.
:wq
Now, after using vi for well over a year, I can truly appreciate its complex simplicity. It has a certain ambience which no gui based I've ever seen has ever come close to matching. These days, I'll use nothing else.
www.brownsauce.org
If simplicity and ease of use is what you want as a writer, you could always fire up PICO.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I use Joe in 80x25 to write all my stuff.. The ctrl+k combinations are intuitive enough to get stuff saved without reading the man page.. I use Joe to write programs in C and Java.. I use it to write on my book in ascii.. good enough for everything...
However, the tech writers that I know tell me that Microsoft Word is neither a good text entry tool, nor a good desktop publishing program. Framemaker is the one that I am used to using, and it seems to have a pretty good rep with the tech writers also. It is rather pricey, however. I still hope that Adobe will change their mind one of these days and release a linux version. (There was a very usable beta that they decided not to make a product out of.) At this moment, I have a copy of Frame running, remote displayed from a Solaris box onto my linux desktop.
To weigh in on the Emacs vs Vi war, I find that knowledge of vi is essential for low-level system administration tasks. I tend to use it for any quick little edits. For heavy-lifting, like programming, I use Xemacs. I like the auto-indentation, and find syntax highlighting makes code much easier to read. I know that gvim will do just about anything that emacs does these days, but I have been using emacs for years, and am too stubborn to switch.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill
Loved to see this, as it matches my experience. Oh, I'm mostly an EMACS user, but when I'm not feeling religious I happily use vi -- say a quick script when I'm su'ed.
When I'm writing fiction, screenplays, or other prose, I just use EMACS text mode, except that recently i've been using emacs-wiki mode. (See here for details.)
All that other crap in Word etc just gets in the way.
(I will say I really liked Word for DOS 6.0, the one that got the new interface but kept regular old character-mode text and style-sheets. Leave it to Microsoft to come up with something really workable, and EOL it.)
i still find the apple //e keyboard to be the most typing friendly of them all. i remember many all-nighters in college working on term papers.
i have to admitthough, that i need to start an essay on a piece of paper, with a rollerball pen.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
I remember VDE ... from my CP/M days. God, I loved that thing. Even though I'm devoted to vim now, I think my fingers still remember some ^k commands ... and definitely ^x=down, ^e=up, ^s=left, ^d=right, ^c=pgdn, ^r=pgup.
I work for a small newspaper and we have related issues. Writers use Word and do all sorts of inconsistent formating (inconsistent from other writers and other paragraphs they wrote). Everything gets placed in Quark XPress and most of the formatting dissappears. Most of the rest of it has to be undone.
.doc just fine, though. It's rather absurd if you ask me. I've been told that Quark 6 opens RTF files, finally, maybe that will put an end to it.
It's absurd to use a word processor that costs hundreds of dollars rather than TextEdit or Notepad just to mark a few words bold or italic (that's all the formatting we keep). It's also too tempting for writers to try to insert tables or images or other nonsense that really needs to be submitted as a seperate file. To make it more difficult, Quark 4.x on the Mac won't open an RTF or SimpleText file and retain the little formatting we need. It'll open a proprietary
Did anybody else ever use "Norton Textra Writer"?
The best link I could find was this glowing 1990 review about it. I guess my love for it came from the fact it was the first word processor program I ever used, back when we carried our Creative Writing 101 papers to school on a 5.25" floppy. It was simple, cheap, and accessable.
Ah... nostalgia!
If I may quote Spider Robinson a moment:
"Goc damn it, you didn't write it on a "word processor"! Or even on a "computer." What it is, is a goddamn typewrite--a machine for turning fingerstrokes on a keyboard into ink symbols on a piece of paper. (Okay, yours can also be used as a computer when you're not writing--my old Ryal manual can be used as a nutcracker, or a paperweight, or a murder weapon.) The silicon revolution did not change that process--from the user's point of view--much more than did the electric typewriter, it merely streamlined the error-correction process. When it's being used to make words appear on a page, it's a typewriter.
To speak of your "word processor" is like refering to your car as an "exothermically powered, myocontrolled matter transporter." [ed. or refering to a flashlight as a "low voltage high density photon projector"] The only purpose of the term is to cue your listeners that you can afford to use a computer as a typewriter, and all it really tells them is that you're insecure enough to worry that people might think you still used one of those old-fashioned things to type on.
--Mike"
Take it for what it is worth...
It's gorgeous, functional, truly multilingual, and rocks my world. It looks like bloody iTunes, which sounds wacky, but actually works astoundingly well. And its $25.
However, I take my writing apps very seriously. For most of my (Mac) friends, I say use TextEdit. It is truly MacWrite reincarnated. Totally dead simple, but with the features you actually need: spell check, ligatures, smart quotes, a tab ruler, Find + Replace, and not a whole hell of a lot else. Oh, well one other thing: the Panther version reads Word docs.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I am a writer, though not professionally I have been published on numerous occasions. My word processor of choice was originally AmiPro (2.0!) under Win98se.
Until I discovered BeOS and GoBe Productive. Haven't looked back since. (contention) Best OS/Office package out there. (/contention)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
why dont you and vi get a room? i like vi also but that was the longest reason to say 'i love vi' i've ever seen. kudos. :q!
I'm not a novelist, but rather a technical writer, so the formatting and so forth of text isn't such a distraction for me (it's just part of the job). The best tool, hands down, for this is FrameMaker. It gets out of your way, but still lets you quickly format text. If you apply styles as you go along (which is very quick... F9, start typing the style name, hit return, and your paragraph is formatted, unlike Word which requires you to choose a unique key combo for each paragraph style shortcut).
For just plain text, I like the Joe text editor (which someone else has already recommended). Of course, I was a bit biased since my college roomate wrote the thing in the first place. I've written a few shorter pieces, and when I find myself on Linux and needing just a simple bit of text, I'll run Joe and whip it together, then import the text wherever it needs to go.
The only fancy-shcmancy feature in modern wordprocessors I really find useful is autotext. I make the same typos over and over again... having a system I can get to fix them for my automatically would be ideal, if it retained the simplicty of, say, Joe. Even spellchecking on the fly, which I usually leave on, can distract from teh flow of words. Having the computer make fixes to obvious typos can help, and not get too under my skin. I would love to see a version of Joe that had just autotext added. That would bump it back up on my list of text editing.
My biggest distrction these days is... well, everything *else* on the computer. The Web (nothing as tempting to a writer than doing a little quick research... but being able to research every single paragraph you are writing at the drop of a hat is a Really Bad Thing). Email. MP3s, etc. Nigh infinite distractions.
This is why I've been thinking of getting an AlphaSmart Dana It's like a laptop specifically aimed at writing. Really long battery life, some flexibility, but still some limitations on what it can do, as far as internet access and whatnot. I've found with laptops, that I'm always keeping an eye on the battery gauge (I;ve never had a laptop that could last over 2 hours or so on a charge, and I get nervous when they get under 50% full. The Dana seems to match the long life of a Palm with a good keyboard...
I doubt there's any other software out there that has single-handedly extended the life of so many rickety old computers (including XT clones), attracted countless technophobes to computers, and triggered the mass extinction of another tool (the typewriter) from most offices all at the same time the way that WP5.1 did. In hindsight, word processors haven't improved much since then; WYSIWYG gets only half credit, since WP had a WYSIWYG preview mode if your graphics hardware supported it.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Ah MY PENIS, aH my penis, AH My PeNiS, AH mY pEnIs, AH MY PENIS!
"Would those green emissions overwhelm my inner eye of imagination, unlike a piece of paper sitting in a typewriter?"
"Could it be that pink shoes and a semi-transparent whiff of cloth really will make me a better woman?"
Seriously, if he gets too distracted by his tools to put down words, maybe he doesn't have much to say to begin with. Besides, there certainly is a touch of forced excentricity to the choices of some famour writers. Hemingway used carpenter's pencils? Ha, the common hack! I will use nothing but the horn of a unicorn to scratch my glorious thoughts into redwood tablets. Anything else just won't do.
more a typewriter with memory, not a desktop publishing system.
That's EXACTLY what I want. What I'm looking for is a machine I can take to a meeting just for note-taking... bare bones, with a reasonable keyboard, and cheap. Don't want or need a PDA or games, just want a note-taking tool, which has to be able to switch keyboard layount to Dvorak.
I'm thinking maybe an old 386 laptop... they've gotta be practically giving 'em away these days.
Any ideas, anyone?
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Why do other people need GRAPHICS (a GUI) to write TEXT?
Writing something that matters vs. writing for school:
I've noticed a marked distinction between when I write something that matters to me (my weekly London journal for example) and when I write something I just want to get done (a school paper).
For my journal, I write it out first longhand on yellow paper. For some reason, if I want something to be a good piece of writing, it has to be done longhand. When I do type it up, I share the author's abhorrence of GUI. Terminal mode emacs is the only way to go for me. No distractions.
When I write something I 'just want to get done', a school paper for example, Microsoft Word is my weapon of choice. Here I can endless distract myself and slowly inflate my writing with a careful choice of fonts, paragraphs spacing, and the ever useful extra points between letters.
P.S. This post was written in word.
Markup languages are nice.
You decide the book would be better with the chapter headings in 14 point - change one definition, reprint, you're done.
Quotes appear as ascii text in the manuscript, as proper quote marks in the finished document.
For most fiction, you simply type. I have written short stories in TeX. A few definitions at the top, then start typing.
For Windows, I like Textpad, a nice combination of a text editor with just enough GUI to be helpful.
Didn't NS write a large part of his new book with a quill? I seem to remember hearing something like that. hmm
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I personally use LaTeX for all of my writing beyond a simple memo (which is usually email at this point). Although I am no professional writer, I find myself writing and maintaining several large documents on a daily basis. Things like software architecture documentation, requirements documents, etc.
Tex's seperation of "content" from "formating" means that, as I am writing, I am not distracted by things like font and layout, I can decide on that stuff later. Then all I do is publish to Postscript,PDF or HTML and I am done.
I have written everything from my master's thesis, to magazine/journal articles, and large(50-200 page) documents for my business with it and have had no complaints. The documents can easily be maintained in a source controll system like cvs, because they are just text. I use the emacs tex-mode for editing the documents and I find it to be a very productive combination.
The other nice thing is that LaTeX is a full fledged typesetting system and does a very good job of laying things out in a consistent manner. IIRC, O'Reilly used to use TeX for typesetting all of there books, but I am not sure if that is still ture. But LaTeX does produce great looking documents, I have recieved numerous comments from my clients on how consistent and professional my documents look.
The only problem with it is when people want to get the document in "word format" so that it can be maintained by someone other than myself. Or when I am working on an article and the magazine requires it to be submitted in word format. I still haven't found a good solution to this, but thankfully it is not something that happens too often.
I have thought about moving to a more "modern" system like DocBook, but I haven't found any good tools for working with DocBook documents yet. Nor do I like the very verbose XML syntax which seems to me to clutter up the text much more than the simple LaTeX directives. So, I really haven't had sufficient motivation to change yet.
Wisest of Miar, knows the meaning of life
Time to get back to the basics folks.
Good writing should really be done on the primary writing environment - that is cuneform and clay.
You should really forego the modern inventions of typewriters, ink and paper and such as they will contaminate the muse and offend the gods. Nothing like the smell and feel of freshly pressed clay tablets.
Possibly only a blunt pencil lead would bear the vitality of words flowing from his fingertips.
I'm wiping tears from my eyes as I struggle to comprehend the power of these utterly compelling images. If I wrote with vi, could I be this good too?
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
I don't really do any sort of creative writing, but I do take most of my notes on my laptop at school.
.rtf without the obnoxiousness of Word.
For that I've found my best bet is Wordpad. It gives me a little bit more flexibility than Notepad, so I can do bold and italics, but I get to save everything in
I write everything in vi, including dissertations, theses, technical journal publications, reports, stage plays, screen plays, and short stories (no books yet).
The key (for me) is to use LaTeX as a markup language. It is available for windows, Mac, and Linux and for non-table non-equation oriented work is trivial to learn. Equations and tables aren't particularly hard either, quicker (assuming you type quickly) than MS Word equation mechanisms. Plus it handles all your typesetting for you. I actually use pdflatex which generates nice pdf files.
Ten years from now, all my work will be in ascii text still, and wether or not LaTeX exists at that time, all I need is a text editor to view my work!
Now, I'm partial to vi, but any sufficiently good text editor would be fine. Functionally rich enough and worth the learning curve.
Call the Police!
(it seems thinkgeek no longer stocks these.. oh well, at least I got mine..)
I've used one of these three programs for most of the writing I've done in the past 8 years or so, since Windoze 95 hit the world. Before that, I used a Wang word processor. Seriously, I agree with the post above where people had nasty words for Word. I strongly dislike word processors, especially ones that do things automatically without asking or indicating what they're about to do, and can't be turned off. I don't know about everyone else, but whenever I make a typing mistake, my fingers have already backspaced over it and retyped the correct letters before my concious brain has fully caught on. So when MS Word changes "teh" to "the" without my telling it to... it pisses me off. :P It's a pity that so many of my business's clients use Word...
Julie Moult is an idiot.
I prefered the Thinkpad for a couple of reasons. First, it had the best keyboard I've ever used. Second, I deliberately never installed games, nor hooked it up to the Internet. So I was never tempted to check email or surf the web when I should be writing.
As for my word processor, OpenOffice did not until recently have a decent "draft mode" type view until recently. ABIword was too unstable (I don't know about the new 2.0 release.) So I've been using WordPerfect 10.0, which has the speed and flexibility I could desire, great footnoting, plus the ability to view embedded codes on the off chance your document gets screwed up.
I'd say right now, my dream system for writing would be:
A mini-PC
Flat panel
Thinkpad 600 Keyboard (how I wish I could buy the keyboard alone, that's why this is a dream PC.)
WordPerfect
A little shopping around for a used 1.6 Mhz system, and the whole thing shouldn't cost more than $400-$500. I couldn't ask for anything better for writing.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
because everybody knows that Power = VI
even freshman Physics students could tell you that...
I do all of my best writing on internet message boards and forums.
The pencil be damned.
I've found EditPlus to be an extremely useful editor. I especially like the column select feature. Search and replace is nice. and also the ability to load 70MB files without any problem.
While I'm not familiar with Textpad, it seems similar to EditPlus
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
ctrl-z only works for your last mistake - then it just redoes your mistake over
But can Ctrl+Z undo saving?
that would totally suck it big time to lose like 250 pages of work
Not if I keep each chapter in a separate file and save often.
becase your pet walked across your keyboard
Not likely if the screen saver has kicked in and locked the terminal. I don't think my cat could figure how to walk across my password.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Another "I don't need all these features!" person. If you don't need 'em, don't use 'em. Take a few days to learn how to use the program (disable the automated formatting/correction, set up templates, pick the fonts you like, etc.) then get to work. "I couldn't figure out how to turn off XYZ" is absurd. Why would you not spend a few days learning how to use a tool that will occupy the majority of your free time for the next few months (or years!)?!?
:rolleyes:
Just because a program has features does not mean you have to use them. That's like complaining that cell phones eliminate personal privacy. Newsflash: They can be turned off. If you don't want to be disturbed by your cell phone, turn it off. If you don't want Word to automatically format your document, turn off auto-format.
And what's that crap about "picking a font" for the day's work?!? Why on earth would you change fonts in the middle of a project? Very few books (speaking of novels (fiction and non)) use multiple fonts. Pick one and stick with it. If you just can't resist toying with the pull-down menu, REMOVE IT.
I remember using word processors in the 80s. They sucked ass. Moving a chunk of text was a true PITA. Why would I want to make it harder than select/click?
Have a little discipline. Learn how to use the tools properly and have the restraint to use only the features needed to get the job done. If your work doesn't call for tables, don't play with them. Leave the colored text alone. Stop changing the font. You're not in kindergarten any more.
Really, I figured someone would have said this by now (maybe they have and I need to refresh again :) but what this guy really needs is
LyX. It's basically a pretty word-processor-style front end for LaTeX. The help files and tutorial explicitly tell you that LyX follows a "WYSIWYM" principle -- What You See Is What You Mean. It tries to avoid pushing details like formatting into the writer's head, and instead focuses on getting the words organized into a meaningful structure. The program takes care of formatting everything based on the style you choose (you can choose any style at any time and the whole doc reflects it on the next preview). It's more or less the whole MVC paradigm that the XML/XSL folks push, but it's actually practical.
After discovering it I became a lot more productive with my writing. Admittedly that was limited mostly to writing college papers, but I spent a lot less time fighting with the word processor over formatting, focused on the writing, and the output was usually awesome looking.
YMMV I guess, if you're a formatting control freak then LyX won't work so well for you. Sometimes it's tough to make it do exactly what you want in the formatting phase too, so I eventually switched to using raw LaTeX or TeX for my docs, but LyX is a good middle of the road solution.
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
As a professional writer, I use a lot of different tools. Several of my books I've used MS Word, because the publishers had special templates and macros they used in production that weren't easily ported or usable in other software. (I know, I tried it.) On other stuff (aka 'submitted but not published' works) I've used TextPad, OpenOffice, and Power Writer . TextPad lets me write without getting any programming or interface nonsense in the way; OpenOffice lets me compose more complex documents with footnotes; and Power Writer contains plot, character, and idea databases that help keep all my reference details in one place. All good, all for different reasons. Except Word. I'm not very fond of Word.
What other WordStar-like control-key command editors are there? I find that not having to take my hands off the home row of keys saves about 15% of editing time. I also find that Vi (Vim) is too complicated and quirky to teach my customers.
I would like to see the authors of the Scintilla editor make control-key commands available, perhaps with a way to change modes between control-key commands and the present shortcut key commands.
To use the control-key commands, the control key should be just to the left of the A key. This program converts the Caps Lock key to a Control key: Ctrl2cap.
Here are a few Control-key editing commands. Anyone who is interested in this subject should contact me for the complete list. (The list formatting is damaged by Slashdot.)
Some Control-Key Editor Commands (Save about 15% of editing time.)
Name of Command Primary Sequence Secondary Sequence
Character left <Left> <^S>
Character right <Right> <^D>
Word left <^Left> <^A>
Word right <^Right> <^F>
Cursor to left side <Home> <^Q><^S>
Cursor to right side <End> <^Q><^D>
Line up <Up> <^E>
Line down <Down> <^X>
Scroll up <^W>
Scroll down <^Z>
Page up <PgUp> <^R>
Page down <PgDn> <^C>
Top of file <^PgUp> <^Q><^R>
End of file <^PgDn> <^Q><^C>
Top of window <^Home> <^Q><^E>
Bottom of window <^End> <^Q><^X>
Up to equal indent <^J><^B>
Down to equal indent <^J><^E>
Go to line <^J><^L>
Go to column <^J><^C>
Go to byte <^J><^A>
Previous cursor position <^Q><^P>
Match braces forward <^Q><^[>
Match braces backward <^Q><^]>
New line <Enter>
Insert line <^N>
Insert control char <^P>
Delete current character <Del> <^G>
Delete left character <BkSp> <^BkSp>
Delete right word <^T>
Delete line right <^Q><^Y>
Delete line <^Y>
you pompous blowhard.
BTW, I know Hemingway and you ain't no Hemingway.
AlphaSmart 3000
AlphaSmart Dana
They're (basically) Palm Pilots with full-sized keyboard functionality, w/o any irritating clip-on devices, etc. Their "word processor" is quite minimalistic with basic features such as spellcheck. Definately a nice tool for the mobile geek writer.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When I write, I still hand-write (or, in my case, scribble) into a notebook, then transfer to Notepad. While it's true I haven't tried for something as huge as a novel, my 20+ page (when typed) short stories are still lovingly started by hand.
-jls
Techno-pagan
The concept goes beyond pencils vs. word processing software. It's all about a craftsman choosing a comfortable tool that gets the job done. That may be vi on a VT100 or could just as well be the latest, bloated version of Word. A great case can be made for a host of options. The value of each is in the eye of the user.
I have a similar contrast with my telephones at home. I have both a fairly new 2.4Ghz wireless model (hidden in a corner) and a few Western Electric Model 500s around the house. The wireless phone is great for checking voice mail or taking a call while remaining mobile. But there's nothing more satisfying than watching visitors grind out a 10 digit number on a dial phone. Or the satisfying chime of real, metal bells when you slam the reciever down after telemarketers call.
... its incredibly obvious.
Children and old people - NOT ALLOWED!!!
"Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" -Homer Simpson
Put differently, it all goes back to the aphorism "Perfection is the enemy of (good/progress/etc.)" which is true not just because in trying to make things perfect you often either ruin them or never finish them - it's true because everyone's idea of perfection is different, but most of us can agree on "pretty good".
fencepost
just a little off
Any idea on how to get OpenOffice.org Writer to do this? If I change the page background, that's how it prints. I only want to change the view.
I'm using Windows XP so I know I could alter the theme in Control Panel, but I don't want to do a system-wide change because it screws up lots of other things (like web browsing).
Help!!
I'm of the same school of thought, keep the writing process as simple as possible so as not to occlude the creativity.
To that end, I have an AlphaSmart(.com) - a small portable keyboard, 4 lines of text, capable of storing about 100 pages (12pt. single spaced courier) of information. It runs on 3 AA (LR6) batteries and gets between 500-700 hours (no, no missing decimal points) of active use per set. I honestly haven't changed them in over a year. All active memory too, never worry about saving - it's always there no matter when it's turned off.
It emulates a keyboard when hooked up to a host machine, so open your favorite app and hit "Send" and the text is put in wherever you want it; connects via ADB, PS2, and USB. The only additional feature I've ever wished for was a VI interface on it to speed up some editing proceedures.
I highly recommend any freelance writer, journalist, novelist, student, etc. take a look at the device. They have a newer model running PalmOS for those who might be interested as well (no Linux, yet).
Any spoon would be too big.
If Dreamweaver MX was more responsive and had spell-as-you-type, I'd dispose of all of my other editors and just use it.
The formatting it's capable of with a single keystroke is exactly the sort I need when writing... i.e., this paragraph is a chapter title, this text is italicized.
More over (and most importantly), I'm left with HTML instead of a binary file.
Put this in your bashrc file alias vi=emacs
beyond all the editor wars, beyond all the people that proposed a thousand different editors (without maybe reading the entire post) - I find this to be a very interesting article. :)
It describes exactly my feelings and my need to find an editor, and I'm happy because (g)vi(m) was my choice, too.
I'm writing this just to tell the author - you're not alone
good job
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Yes, VDE is the best pure writer's editor I have ever used. I haven't found anything quite like it on Linux -- I mostly use vi, now, or JED in WordStar/Borland mode.
Ironically, it was VDE that got me started on my transition to Linux. Switching from WordStar 7 to VDE meant switching from WordStar's near-ASCII format to pure text. That led to the discovery of text processing tools, like grep and awk, which could be freely obtained for DOS. Soon I was writing formatting programs in awk and getting curious about Linux, where text processing tools including a new text processing language called perl were part of the environment. When Windows 95 came out, I chose to learn Linux and perl, instead.
Click here, go to photo gallery, next over to the last photo, which is of Hemingway at work on For Whom The Bell Tolls.
He ain't using no carpernters pencil. This is just more legend built around the man, you know, the gruff outdoorsy type who shuns the technological trappings of modern society.
Anyhow, this fella's writing is terrible, you posted two textbook examples of purple prose. Gratuitous overuse of the language simply for its own sake, distracting from the piece rather than adding to it.
However, does any of this matter? Or is it just a longwinded "MS is ghey I like vi better!" troll?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I always liked using the application that comes with the system when providing simple documentation. Then I can always read it.
Unix-vi
Windows-wordpad/notepad
What Else is there.
WhatMeWorry
On my Mac I use BBEdit almost exclusively now for note-taking and the occasional creative writing I do. It's perfectly suited (and in fact designed) for coding, but it's stability, speed, and simplicity make it ideal for any task.
Now I only fire up Word when professors insist on pretty formatting for my assignments. As I take more and more CS classes, this is less of an issue.
I write a lot of reports, which eventually require more formatting than you can get from a text editor. But I write all the initial drafts in Emacs, and only use a word processor to apply formatting when the content development phase is pretty much over.
Since I started doing this, my output has increased significantly, and the whole process is way more pleasant.
My main two reasons to avoid it are:
1. Search / Search Replace are terrible. To search you are required to bring up a new window and is not very featureful (regex, incremental search, etc). Replace is equally or more lacking.
2. Undo is only one step.
Both of these things are in emacs and vim. Emacs and vim are ported to nearly every platform in existence, and both emacs and vi, can also serve many other purposes besides writing text like programming, publishing (w/ latex, nroff, etc.), letters, mail, and news.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
Having cut my computing teeth on the Apple // series, I also long for the days of writing on the Apple. Appleworks was my tool of choice, mostly for research papers and lesson plans, since I was a technical educator at the time. I wrote some of my best stuff on a //c with Appleworks 2.0. WordPerfect 5.1 for Dos was as close to the Apple experience as I ever got. I now use vi to compose, then clean it up and format with some other tool just like the author.
What about him constantly resizing his xterm and changing the font and size?
blah blah blah....what problems this modern author faces! Those nasty pulldown menus always get in the way of my genius too.... It was really special how he tied that Hemmingway bit from the top and came full circle at the end...neato! Very professional! Quirky artiste types can hang out in abandonded buildings and discuss how font options crush their creative muse. I'd rather get some writing done.
Okay, I'm at least a semi-pro writer (one published book, contributing editor for DV Magazine). And I think folks are completely missing how to use Word correctly, and its strengths. I'll be talking about Word for Mac v.X here. Even though Office XP is quite capable, I can't stand the way that they put icons in the left of the menus. Plus there's no better to write than with a laptop in the lap, leaning back in the Aeron, feet on the desk keeping the beat with NoFx.
Back around '89 when I first got Word 4.0 on my Mac SE, I did procrastinate by too much formatting. But I got over it! The key is just to define your standard template. Get that template down, and you're writing object-oriented with styles. Understanding how to use styles and tabs is critical to efficient Word use. Instead of doing it spaghetti-code style with formatting applied directly to units of text, build the right design for each style, and religiously only use styles. If you need to change the style later, it's changed in all instances. Much, much easier.
I NEVER mess with formatting when writing articles anymore, since my standard template has my styles all set up the way I want them.
The real strength of Word is that it lets you deal with your content in a variety of modes. I actually write all my first drafts in Outline mode now, so I can see and tweak the overall structure. This means I don't need to write linearly, like a typewriter is required. I can write what I'm inspired to write that moment, skip back to get terms used later defined in the appropriate place, and that kind of thing. And since the outline headings are styles, formatting concerns just disappear into the background. And because, the structure is always visible, it's much easier to remember what you intended to do, and to pick up on structural errors in my original plan for the piece.
When I'm editing, especially someone else's work, I use Normal mode. Thus I'm not distracted by where page breaks are and that kind of thing. Just the text.
Page Layout mode I use rarely. Word isn't designed for any kind of detailed layout. Still, it's nice to see where the page breaks fall before going out to PDF or anything. But I'll just import into InDesign if I need fine control.
So, big picture:
Use Styles to make structure, not formatting, central.
Use the right viewing mode for the stage of your project.
My video compression blog
"I found a disconcerting bug in my otherwise dependable word processor. It repeated words, on occasion..."
It isn't uncommon to repeat words when you you type. I wouldn't be suprised if the author was at fault instead of the editor.
I always write a C program that generates the novel through complex algorithms. Then, to protect myself from any IP infrigement suits and DMCA violations, I rewrite the C program in ML and Haiku, and make T-shirts showing the source code.
for writing, creative writing, i use the psion series 5 (or series 5MX meanwhile) - and can't imagine anything better - in the built in word processor you can turn off all scroll/toolbars, you can set up a really big font and, the killer reason: you can do thumb writing - you hold the handheld in both hands and can reach all keys with your left and right thumb. this way you can write in cars (not while driving! ;) ) in the train, lying in the bed - it's just perfect..
..and the device is small enough to take it with you all the time..
when finished you sync the text with the pc directly into your favorite wordprocessor for spellchecking and formating..
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
Was it a big Wang, or a little one?
-1, Cheeky
I've had this complaint about word processors for a while now. They tie the formating and the content too closely together. It's a symptom of the WYSIWIG mentality. It's excatly the same as hardcoded constants in programs. Once the formating is inplace it's almost imposible to change on a macroscopic level. It also make it harder to ensure that the formatting conventions are consistant.
I haven't fully tried it but I understand "lyx" attempts to to break the WYSIWYG problem in a user friendlyish way. Docbook also helps but seems a bit too program documentation centric.
Anyway once you decide to seperate formatting and content. Using a text editor rather than a word processor is a logical choice. I like vi but any decent editor should work.
emacs rulz.
illegitimii non ingravare
www.notetab.com
A simple text and HTML editor that is very powerful, free and customizable. No frills if you do not want them.
Crimson Editor is my favorite freeware editor. If only it came with source I would port it to linux.
If you're on windows check it out: www.crimsoneditor.com
It's simple and fast but also makes a great programmer's editor with syntax highlighting, block selection, etc. Did I mention that it's free?
The key as the author points out is to totally forget about presentation when you're *trying* to focus on content.
No; presentation matters. We've all had moments, probably daily, where we paused in the middle of writing an email because plain text wasn't going to convey what we meant. We want to emphasize a word or set something apart from the main body of the message. After several years of working in Word (and Wordalikes like AmiPro), I think in formatted text. If I had to write in Notepad, I'd have one hand tied behind my back.
Granted, I'm not a novelist, I'm a tech writer. Formatting is important to what I do--for clarity, emphasis, visual appeal. This "write it first, then format it" idea may work for you... but not for me, and not for a lot of people.
Nice article
I find that the tool that I'm using affects output even more so with music. My music sounds markedly different when I use a tracker rather than a sequencer, and also when I use one certain type of tracker or sequencer over another. The interface has a great deal to do with it, as does the ease of generating certain tonal effects in different programs. My personal sequencer of choice is Bars & Pipes on the Amiga. It's interface and features are like no other, and being pretty old it has no recording facilities so the emphasis is on pure music data. Consequently my best and most creative work has come from using that program.
At the end of the day, the end result is what is most important, but the method you choose can greatly affect that result. Computers are just tools and the "latest and greatest" tool just might not bring out the best in the individual user.
Best damn set up ever. 'nuff said.
i sure like vi, but often d2l and think I could have just hit delete twice and saved a keystroke...
I cannot help but think of the example of Arthur C. Clarke and I pray that I remember this correctly. He had delivered the final draft of a novel to his publisher and told them that it was his last, he is retired, there will be no more. They send back a Keypro "portable" computer with WordStar installed. These beasties would gave you a hernia at the airport and probably would even meet today's strict carry-on standards.
So, he boots it up and plays with it. Tries out Wordstar. He is so jazzed that he rips out a whole frigging novel (over the course of a couple of days) and sends a draft to the publisher who is very pleasently "surprised", I think. Best investment they had ever made!
It was about this time, I was trashing Wordstar to any and all would could hear. I hated the program with it's insane four button keystrokes. This story shut me up, well for a bit. I love the novels he has written since.
I'm so old I can remember writing with a pad of paper and pencil, and doing multiple drafts! So there! Back then we composed computer programs with punch cards and later a line editor, if we were lucky. When I first used a screen editor (VMS EDT for me), it was an epiphany, and email came hot on its heels. Being able to delete and insert in place, and even cut and paste, while looking at a whole screenful (i.e. about a paragraph in those days) was a huge innovation.
Those developments didn't make me look back fondly on pencil and pad, and WIMPy editors don't make me look back fondly on keyboard operated editors like vi. I agree that formatting is a pain in the butt when one is writing, but the presence of formatting tools doesn't require one to use them, and I have grown to appreciate an outlining tool for anything longer than a couple of pages.
Of course one doesn't need Word for an outliner, but there is one in there, and formatting tools as well. So what's not to like? Why NOT use a single program to go from outlining to writing to formatting the final document?
Apart from the fact that Word crashes too much and ruins imported graphics far too often, that is?
ThosEM
Turbo-Powered Editor (do a search) has all the control-key commands listed in F1 help. The latest version of TPE is 3.4, but I can't find that online.
It's terrible that this technology was lost whe GUI editors were made. Control-key commands save 15% in editing time, and they are easy to teach.
I wrote my book using vi. All the editing was done via Word, which was enough experience to teach me that: 1) Word sucked bad gas as a writer's tool and 2) Word rocked as an editing environment. My publisher utilized a template (DOT file) that greatly simplified the exchanges between me and my editors, so I have to grudgingly admit that Word has its uses. OTOH I could no way see myself using it to actually write my texts. Vi provides the tools I want as a writer, all from the keyboard, all very fast, all out of my way until I need them. And a little knowledge about regular expressions goes a long way in vi too...
Emacs rocks too, but I learned vi first and better.
Well, I know a fair number of S.F. writers who use various methods. One of my friends does her first drafts with pencil and paper. Another uses every feature of word, including having special styles for the little dividers between scenes.
Personally, I didn't find it hard to turn off the features of Word I don't want: grammar, clippy, auto-everything (except the em-dash --we need a key for that). All gone. I do use stylesheets, but more for outlining. Outlining in Word helps me quite a bit. Font selection? That's a bit silly. Pick one font and run with it. Courier 12 is the standard in my genre. Most publishers have clear guidelines that state as much.
But the single biggest problem with word processors is a feature no one will ever disable -- the ability to edit as you type. This is why my friend uses pencil and paper and why some writers use VI or manual typewriters. Wordprocessors make it too easy to stop the flow of writing and waste time editing. Editing is important, but for many it's a distraction and should be left to the end.
My own process tries to cope with editing as I go. At this point, I can start a day's writing without editing everything that came before (a process that sometimes left 10 minutes to write new stuff). But it's not easy. And it's often the case that if I were to just cut whole sections and rewrite them instead of editing a word here and there, they might come out better in the end.
But that could just be me.
When I was born, the vi vs. emacs war was raging.
As I've grown, learned, gotten various degrees and worked in the industry, the vi vs. emacs war has raged on.
When I'm wheezing my last breath in a nursing home, forgotten and alone, the vi vs. emacs war will be raging.
When humankind has long since either extinguished itself, or converted itself into some form of pure energy, the vi vs. emacs war will STILL be raging.
Only the death of the universe, in whatever form it happens, will stop the raging. *sob*
P.S.: vi forever!
In his wonderful little essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line."
M _I _C_O_N.shtml
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_
His choice was emacs, but the motivation was the same.
I'm a formally trained touch typist who hates meta keys, so I go with vi.
In any case the choice of text editor isn't a religious war item to me. Use Notepad for all I care. It works. The true religous war is Word Processor vs. Text editor.
If you are truly a professional writer your job is simply to get words down on paper. Someone else, who is a specialist in the field, does the final formating. If you load up your document with formating codes the first thing they have to do is strip it all out anyway, so your work formating is wasted and it annoys the hell out of them.
Who would have thunk that the command line, a text interface, in text mode, would be the ideal method for generating text?
Every tool you could possibly want is inherent in the system. Any one time use tool you can imagine can be whipped up by a script. No bitching that your WP doesn't have a particular "function."
What's more, it's fast as lightning. If you're getting paid by the word/page this is important.
Just for giggles I just ran Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire through wc. Over a quarter million words and a million and half charaters, as it turns out, and the response was nearly instantanious.
Things like word count and spell checkers have now been included in Linux word processors, in part because these are now running under windows as well, where such functions are actually necessary if you wish to get any work done, but initially because there was a demand for them from people switching to Linux from Windows who simply didn't understand that such "functions" were already inherent in the system.
Forgive me if I keep repeating that last phrase over and over again. Some mules take more than one whack with the 2x4 before you can get their attention.
For the professional wordsmith there is nothing more powerful, and just plain joyous to use, than a plain text editor, at the command line, in text mode, under a Unix enviroment.
You'd almost think it was written that way, huh?
KFG
its all about when will cygnus editor be ported from the amiga to linux. then the editor text processing war can end. where is this leviathon to receive my keystokes and my hours of macro programming?
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
You all laughed at me in the Computing Science lab! "Why are you using vi? Get with the times, at least use Emacs." But I preservered.
I got my Amiga, and what editor did I end up using in favor of everything including for my word processing needs? Yup, a vi clone.
When I got my PC a couple years ago, the happiest day for me was finding out ready and waiting for me was my beloved vi. Cleaned up, slicked up and VIMproved. I still love using vi. Mouse? Why would I want to slow down? Can you use Notepad's Search & Replace command to change a tab-delimited data file into properly formatted C code? I think NOT!
VI will outlive them all! After the nuclear war, the cockroaches will rebuild society and use VI as their editor of choice. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
As a fellow writer I recently retreated to an Alphasmart (http://www.alphasmart.com/). I'm much happier having the ability to JUST WRITE when that's all I want to do. No distractions.
I use Word for writing, but Word at its most minimal - all the gimgaws turned off, no toolbars, no silliness. If 10.3's version of Textedit is sufficiently advanced, I may use that. All I need is something that will save text.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
" Possibly only a blunt pencil lead would bear the vitality of words flowing from his fingertips."
Yes, and perhaps only a 2x4 would bear the "vitality" of repeatedly striking your skull for such a moronic statement.
Sure, you're a writer. You live for the flair. Maybe even for the drama. But puh-leez, get a grip on reality.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
...practically the day it was invented. Indeed, it can be argued that he started using one before it had been invented, or at least perfected.
Jack London began using a typewriter the very instant he could afford one. The one he could afford wasn't very good--a balky Blickensderfer that required great effort to operate, was badly aligned, and only typed in uppercase--and he switched to a better one as soon as he could afford that.
Here's a picture of the typewriter he used from 1904 on.
"Creative people" latched onto the Macintosh within months of its introduction.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sometimes, a program just doesn't need to be better than it currently is. I know that's an anathema to companies that make their money by capitalizing on a brand name and an upgrade cycle, but really, is there anything more than those simple programs that you need? It's not like printed text has really changed all that much (compared to other communication technology) in the last thousand years.
Certainly it is true that each writer must find his or her own best way to get those words to paper. The search for simplicity should include -- for those of us stuck in the Microosoft swamp -- WordPad. It's Spartan enough for any simplistic needs I can imagine and thoroughly transportable to any other word processor or page layout software.
Those who trade freedom for security will soon have neither.
I find it hard to believe nobody has linked to my favorite editor joke yet:
Ed, man!
Vi is was just too much like ed on a DecwriterIII serialed to a PDP11/70, joe is a dream come true for this cp/m z80 Wordstar fan! I've been writing software, web sites and databases ever since exclusively in Joe.
... Bill's Vi was a bolt on for Ed so we could see a full screen of text, instead of just a few lines at a time, right?
OK, history lesson, anybody remember "ed"? Am I remembering correctly?? After so many years, us old guys get forgetful
Well, for creative writers, a big part of the problem is the industry. Publishers usually want to accept a manuscript that's 12 point courier on white paper with 1 inch margins. No bold or italics allowed, just underlines.
The reason is that the copy editor who receives your 500 page manuscript, and who wants to review it to see if it's worthy of publication, makes her money with her eyes, so reading 500 page manuscripts daily would make her go blind.
So she wants a hard coypy. She doesn't want to print a hard copy herself, because 500 pages times the hundreds of manuscripts she receives in any given week would quickly add up -- and plus there's an aura of privilege, why should SHE pay to give YOU the honor of being published?
So when you have to output plain text anyway, why use a word processor? Especially Word or OO, which are going to do their best to translate special characters like curly quotes and long hyphens, which publishers don't want to see.
Just to add to the drivel, I use TextPad every day for everything from simple text files to Perl scripts to HTML coding and anything else the crippled NotePad can't do. Regular expression search-and-replace (even in files), sorting, blocking, spell checking, syntax highlighting, and a whole other list of included features. And it saves it all in plain old ASCII text files (DOS or UNIX formatted). Of course, it includes saving in UniCode but we won't go there.
Here is a review from 1978 of the first word processor I ever used:
http://www.swordpoint.com/electric.htm
It was extremely simple, running on a TRS-80 Model I. My dad installed an aftermarket switch next to the shift key so that we could use lowercase letters. I regretted the day we switched over to Lazy Writer when we went to the Model III. My big problem with it is that it had "modes"--you typed in one mode and accessed commands in another mode, meaning you had at least 2 more keystrokes per command. Here is the programmer's website, with a late-70s ad for the software:
http://www.explainamation.com/words/trash80.htm
Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS was my next word processor. It was powerful, but DOS didn't allow multitasking. Also, the WP for Windows I used was lousy at pasting in graphics from other apps, like Lotus 123, so I switched to Word for Windows.
Word is the standard in my industry--grantwriting and evaluation--and one pretty much has to use it because the US Govt posts its grant application materials, including forms and tables, as Word documents. I tried to switch to a host of Linux-based word processors, including StarOffice 6 Writer, but tables, graphics, and other minute formatting details of the docs get fouled up during conversion, which is unacceptable when you are passing drafts back and forth with other Word users. It is a powerful but obstimate word processor. You really have to learn its intracacies (like I have) through bitter experience in order to use it effectively (e.g., number pages properly in a complex, multisection document). I thought Word was terribly expensive until I looked at the price of Electric Pencil--$100 in the late 70s. That's only a little less than what you'd pay for Office in today's dollars.
I write fiction as well as reports and grant applications and I find the power to reformat my documents to be a spur to a creativity rather than a barrier to it. Changing margins and fonts and using special features and graphics can energize the creative process rather than interfere with it.
No one else liked the Model III much, so it was mine, all mine! It had a word processor program, Scripsit, which seemed as natural for me to use as breathing. I don't remember a single command today, but I do remember that it seemed effortless to use. The plays I wrote on that system were performed on campus, won some contests, and even earn me a scholarship in an MFA program.
Sadly, when I left to go to grad school, I had to leave the Model III behind... and nothing I've tried since has felt the same. Many times over the years, I've considered ebaying a Model III and running Scripsit again - I still have the old disks! - but what if the magic isn't there? Better perhaps, to keep my fond memories intact...
My lit teacher despised Hemingway, the best recommendation for an author I've found.
Oh, really, this is boring. Go flame alt.fan.Hemingway and leave us alone.
Artists have a vision of the end result of their art. As another person in this thread mentioned, writers often string words together not because they are grammatically correct, but because, on top of being grammatically correct, also invoke a certain emotion in the reader.
;-)
Unfortunately the emotion that most "artists" usually evoke is confusion
Parfor text formating
AspellBecause I suck at spelling.
"think of it as evolution in action"
What this all amounts to is user interface and software design. WYSIWYG is a flop as a UI paradigm for many applications. It makes the simple things easy for the absolute beginner, and then gets in their way for the rest of their career.
Part of the problem is with GUI and WYSIWYG itself. It's a great way to organize different tasks in the workspace, and some even like it to visualize files and folders. It's a must for photo editing. However, it's a lousy way to enter text, and constantly switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse is little better.
Menus aren't half bad for obscure or little used features, but shouldn't require a contortionist or a woodpecker (let's see, down, down, down, down, left, down, down,down,return) to operate effectivly with a keyboard.
the alternative seems to be a flat 'control surface' with all of the simplicity of a nuclear plant console.
Since that didn't work so well, enter the user customizable controls so that it takes 3 weeks to get things where you want them and it bears no resemblance to anyone else's setup. Talk a tech support nightmare, not to mention trying to borrow someone else's computer for a moment. To make matters worse, now, most of the UI is in a global scope so that bugs rise exponentially with lines of code rather than near linearly.
On the other hand, there's interfaces like VI. It can be confusing at first, especially for beginners who aren't sure what mode really means. They get a bit lost as to why sometimes backspace does what they expect, and other times not. It's not intuitive and it's not meant to be.
However, for the price of feeling uncomfortable for a few days, it provides a fast and efficient interface that will serve the user well for the rest of their career. Remember that vi was specifically designed to be fast, even over a limited bandwidth such as a 300 baud modem or fingers on a keyboard. A small bit of learning to get over the lack of intuitiveness is handsomely rewarded. Soon enough, the finger motions become automatic and the text bends and changes at the author's whim. Switching keyboard to mouse, clicking down menus never gets that fast and never feels that easy, no matter how much you use it.
If you need to do page layouts, vi is the wrong tool. We have other tools for that like latex. At the same time, for entering text, latex doesn't even pretend to be the right tool. Things like Office manage to nearly always be the wrong tool if productivity matters.
I've tried dozens of different kinds of pens over my lifetime, and the one that I've settled on and now insist on is the inexpensive Pilot EasyTouch Medium Point ball-point (the Fine Point is good too, but not quite as smooth). It is the smoothest writing instrument I've found, whether ball-point, roller-ball, gel, fountain pen, or whatever. And it always just seems to work; it doesn't dry on me and require those scribbles to get the ink flowing after several days of non-use, like other ball-points. Strangely it doesn't seem to be a standard stock item and I have to special order it from Staples. The blue color seems slightly smoother than red or black, but that may be subjective.
As for pencils, for years I used to use a Pentel P205 .5mm, but recently
I've come to prefer the Staedtler 9505 .5mm. An advantage is that it
doesn't have that frustrating slippage in the last 1/4" of lead that you
end up throwing away. I also like a very soft lead (2B) because it
writes dark with little effort. But that's just me - it takes getting
used to because the lead is so fragile, and other people sometimes get
frustrated when I lend it to them, breaking the lead over and over
because they're used to pressing hard.
I had a similar problem when writing. I decided to bring a old Beige G3 Mac back to life and installed 1) Virtual PC; 2) DOS and 3) WordPerfect 5.1; the last a pirated copy since versions on Ebay were selling for over $50. I then went to full screen mode and have a working simulation of an IBM PC in 1989. Unplug the mouse, and the modern distractions (IM, Web, Email) are gone. I set up a WebDAV server as a shared drive in Virtual PC, so I can access the documents via my ibook and do editing and formatting there. I've found WP 5.1 much easier to edit, however; there is something to be said for white text on a blue background.
I love vi dearly for all my sysadmin-related activities, but I've found it to be a little cumbersome for writing emails and other paragraph-formatted text. With a lot of word processors, you can type a paragraph, go back to the beginning of the paragraph and add a sentence, and the WP will push the existing text along without hosing up the line breaks. How can you make vi more...uh...word-processory?
"Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." - Hunter S. Thompson
I sometimes compose in BBEdit just for its simplicity and speed. Later, I format the document in a word processor (OpenOffice.org for the last year).
I, too, hate Word for all the same reasons that the author mentioned and I hate OpenOffice.org for mimicing all of Word's flaws.
There's something nice about writing in a text editor. You don't get distracted by all the little adjustments available in word processors. You just write.
That's what it's all about, anyway.
--Richard
PS: I ALWAYS turn off live spellchecking.
Why use vi when there's ed!
Neil Gaiman wrote American Gods by hand. Now that's oldschool ;)
"With American Gods, it was the first time that I had actually gone, okay here's a blank book--one of these big leather-bound black sketch books; some store was clearing them out, had a major sale on these big sketch books, 500 pages. So I bought a bunch of them, and sat down and wrote the words "American Gods" with a fountain pen on page one and turned it over and started to write. That was a very, very conscious thing. I really wanted a second draft. It's my experience with computers that they do not give you a second draft.
Computers give you an ongoing, ever-improving first draft, but there is no discontinuity there. I wanted that, so I wrote the book by hand, and after every few chapters I would stop and type up what I had done so far."
EditPlus! I'm using EditPlus v2.11 at work as a student programmer at my school. There are many people around me who work in vi, but I have never felt even remotely motivated to learn the commands for that program. EditPlus is like a hyped-up notepad, with line numbers, etc... all the good functions of a word processor (like ease of use) without all the annoying MS crap.
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
I write for a living. I sell novels. The lifespan of a novel is over a decade -- if it's a successful one, several decades. I don't dare use proprietary storage formats that may become inaccessible in five or ten years: plain text with embedded markup is essential. And markup in a simple macro format I can roll my own parser for if I need to -- I currently use POD format as it's rich enough for writing novels as well as Perl documentation.
But I still have to keep a copy of Microsoft Word to hand. Because the publishers I deal with want an electronic copy for their typesetters these days, and they expect everyone to use Word, despite its gross inadequacies as a novelist's tool (untameable Autocorrect, insane file-format lock-in, stupid reliance on mouse over keyboard, and all).
Flash forward a few years. Now I am a writer about computer programming. And mostly because of that transition, I absolutely cannot stand to write anything other than plain text. Well, almost plain text, I have my own little variant called "smart ASCII", which uses just a few of the conventions that email and Usenet often use: *bold*, -itals-, and so on.
In fact, I have written hundreds of articles, tutorials, and the like about programming (for well-known publishers like IBM, Intel, O'Reilly, etc.), all in plain text. My book Text Processing in Python is written the same way.
Well... once in a while I am compelled to use something awful like MS-Word--or something that exports to it, like AppleWorks or OpenOffice--but I hate doing that. It is tools that convert my smart ASCII into formats like HTML, XML, LaTeX, PDF, and so on. But those tools come at the end of the process. After I put the words down, then is the time to worry about niggly details like fonts, layouts, and so on... all in a way that is far more consistent than a wordprocessor is likely to produce. My book, for example, has been praised as particularly attractive typographically... I did all the preparation myself, by eschewing all the GUI nonsense that gets in the way during writing. David Mertz
Buy Text Processing in Python
The parent author recommended notepad precisely because it does NOT have these stupidly complicated features that a writer will not know how to use anyway.
Hell, just quitting vi is a chore that can't be done by someone unfamiliar with the software.
I'm pretty sure that vim has features like that these days, and certainly emacs has had them for ages. (If you're interested in trying emacs, the first thing you should do after running it is ESC-x viper-mode to put it into a vi-emulator).
Yes, emacs has a lot of whizzy features that some like to call "bloat", but it's actually not that heavy-weight a program by todays standards, and most of the features are off by default. You can turn off more of them by adding some lines to your .emacs file:
And this is probably recommended for writers:
I do all of my literary writing in either an old shareware DOS text editor called QEdit (later renamed TSE Jr. and still available), or in a freeware Apple II "word processor" called AppleWriter II (which I nowadays run in an emulator, mainly for ease of transferring the files to a PC later).
It's not that I don't like modern word processors or that I don't use them extensively -- I do -- but for actual creative writing, the ambience and simplicity of tools I've been using for upwards of twenty years suits me fine. (I typically do later drafts in MS Word or, increasingly, OpenOffice.org.) This may be the result of the same instinct that has me logging far more time playing Galaga in MAME than I do playing GTA: Vice City.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I really like writing in vi also, but my problem is that I also want to be able to view my writing (based for the web) in html or pdf, etc. In the past my solution was to write in LaTeX, because the formatting commands didn't take up a lot of room compared to the text itself. But right now the thought of doing that exhausts me. What I really want is something where I can make a style template that is then invisible, and then continue to write in vi. Is there a way to do this? Maybe one of the LaTeX wysiwig editors has a vi mode where you can do all the typing and editing with vi/vim commands?
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
Okay, I use Emacs. I write in raw text, double-space paragraphs, nothing particularly weird. If I want some formating, some emphasis, I use LaTeX macros in-line. I have a pair of python scripts that convert what I've written in for the past eight years into either LaTeX or HTML. The "toHTML" version is pluggable as a CGI script, so I can preview what my work looks like no the web, while a makefile drives the toLaTeX script to render PDFs. The LaTeX framework I use is sffms (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Manuscript LaTeX toolkit). The only "oddity" is that I've installed wordcount.el. I do my outlines in emacs outline mode. The scripts know how to deal with that.
Other useful tools:
Aspell for a spelling engine. It's much better than Ispell. Rhyme, Style, Diction, and WordNet all make the writer's life simple.
And the best thing about plain text: a remote CVS repository for backups, history, and logs!
If you're so smart, why aren't you naked?
Wow... Kuro5hin people are always saying that K5 is becoming more and more like /. - now K5 is getting it's revenge on Slashdot!
No matter where you go, there you are; even before you arrive.
I've often heard people complain about Word with long documents, but I've never had any issues with them myself (up to about 120 pages, personally). How long is "long?"
As for footnotes, even back in 1992, Word + EndNote did my thesis in APA style perfectly without breaking a sweat. HUGE time saver compared to what other folks had to go through.
I've never used, or even seen LaTeX? Any good versions for Mac OS X I should check out?
My video compression blog
But there's something remarkably adept about this computer that makes it so functional. We originally used AppleWorks on it, which was a typical Works suite. Then we used MultiScribe, which was a MacWrite clone (fonts that printed beautifully to an Apple ImageWriter). Then we bought PublishIt! 2 for the thing that gave us desktop publishing. And then we were pushing it; PublishIt! 2 was slow.
But I had to hook up my //e the other day to check some serial hardware, and while I was at it I took a trip down memory lane. Things that I thought were slow 10 years ago were pretty damn fast by today's standards! A 1 MHz //e, fast! To launch MultiScribe, you had to startup the //e with the floppy in the drive, wait for it to ask you to flip the floppy over (insert disk 2), and then hit return for it to continue. I used to think that took forever. It turns out that's faster than OS X booting up on my G4, and I think faster than Illustrator 10 or Photoshop starting up. And honestly, nobody uses the features that Microsoft Word has over the features that MultiScribe has.
For those who aren't familiar, the //e's spec'd as (mine's an original, but the later ones shipped as) 128 K of RAM at 1 MHz. You can expand the RAM quite a bit, add a hard drive, add networking, add a Postscript Laserwriter, and honestly expand anything you can think of (that's what the 'e' stands for), but they're generally expected to be used as I said, and perhaps with a mouse. BTW, the //e had 15 character file names with Macintosh-style type and creator meta-data (no 3-character extensions like DOS to determine file types); it was quite a shock when my Dad bought a powerful 8 MHz 286 for his business and it was so... archaic :)
We can do a whole lot more work with a whole lot less CPU power; the //e is a testimony to that. Compare the original Palms to the Windows CE devices. The first Palms were great! They were instant sellers because they served a useful purpose; not because they had a bazillion features. OS X is nice and all, but most of the CPU time and RAM isn't spent doing much. I'm looking at getting more RAM (I have 768, I'm thinking of popping in a 512MB dimm) just because I do hit the max every so often. Software developers have grown accustomed to growing hardware requirements, and it's really a shame.
When my older brother did CS in University, his computer lab consisted of 16 MHz Sun workstations and he did quite a bit of assembly programming over a few courses. He had to write controller software for a robot arm in assembly. When I did computer science at a different University (I started in 96), we had 300 MHz UltraSparcs, did most of our stuff in C, and I had one course in assembly where we didn't actually execute the code on hardware. The new students to CS do everything in Java; compare that (garbage collection) to programming a robot arm in assembly. (FYI, I'm all for garbage collection as a programming practice, but they don't teach you calculus in university because it's useful. They teach it to you because it makes your brain hurt).
While it's absolutely fantastic that Apple went from the Copland/Gershwin route to Mach/BSD, they did lose a bit in the process; one of the features of Copland's NuKernel was that it ran within 1 MB of RAM. Holy crap. That's what happens when you write stuff from scratch and start over. Multics is generally considered a failure but it did actually ship. Most people don't know what it was, and just think "it was too complex to even exist." Here's a quick rundown of its features,
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
DeScribe was [and still is, IMO] one of the best 'all-around' word processors around. Small footprint, just enough bells and whistles, does everything you need it to, runs on Win 3.1, Win95, OS/2, and was *cheap*.
Why doesn't somebody port *that* to Unix? It's a helluva lot better than AbiWord!!
>>I actually use pdflatex which generates nice pdf files.
when you use pdflatex, or ps2pdf, or anything under linux to make pdf files, do you ever have problems embedding fonts? for some reason it never seems to look nice under pdf.. as in smooth fonts, etc. of course printing it never has that problem...
my blog
There you go. The one obvious truth that you missed. Just like other features that people never use, what good is Help if people will not use it?
I can't even blame people for not using Help. Sure it seems it might have actually led to a solution in this case, but in about 80% of the cases I try help it's the most unproductive 30 minutes of my day until I figure out that what I really wanted to do is not spelled out by help.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
???=E*m*a*c*S. The units work out to Joules^2*Newtons/(Coulomb*Kelvin).
Yeah, I don't think that really means much.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I found a disconcerting bug in my otherwise
dependable word processor. It repeated words, on
occasion, in the text
Could it be that over all those years you'd been
been typing those doubles without realizing it?
It is one of the the most common writing errors to
to make.
Plus it's highly unlikely that a word processor would have a bug like this, concidering the way text is usually stored internally.
no comment
vim on a 80x25 character terminal.
.doc format.
dict for word selection.
ispell for spell checking.
latex for typesetting.
I just don't know that we've come very far with word processing in the past 10 or even 20 years. Looking at Microsoft Word, for example, why is it that we need those many menus of complex and technical features? If someone were to ask me, without looking, what sort of features these are, I wouldn't even be able to imagine what they might be. What more could Microsoft Word possibly provide that we don't have in the above four tools?
Computers were supposed to make our lives easier, not create more tedious tasks for us to perform.
With the above four tools, anyone, from a grade school student to a professional writer can create high quality documents ready for printing. All of these tools are freely available and will run on even a i386 machine.
I will take a document typeset with LaTeX to one "formatted" with Microsoft Word, anyday.
Look at how long these tools (or some near ancestor of) have been available.
Microsoft Word is an exercise in tedium. Unfortunately I need to be able to produce documents compatible with its
What's really so very sad is that even in our public school systems Word is sold on the students as being almost necessary for quality composition these days.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
The interesting question is not that an old-school writer and computer user (Apple II? 1999!) uses vi, but rather, in fifteen years time will a new breed of writers be ebaying copies of OfficeXP because new tools are not conducive to their creative processes?
I regularly have to "fix" all sorts of "problems" for friends and family, whether over the phone or with them looking over my shoulder - they aren't "stupid" or "lazy", they just lack confidence. All of them have experience hitting some key or other and having the computer crash (Windows ME was a huge confidence-crusher all-around). They've learned that doing the "wrong" thing, which is usually just hitting the wrong key or the wrong menu item, destroys what they've done or activates something they don't want and don't know how to get rid of (typically don't know what it is or how it got there). My advice has always been "if you don't know, ask me instead of poking around" - while it may disparage learning and waste my time, it's better than the alternative (from over-the-phone rants about technology to completely reformatting hard drives).
They aren't stupid or lazy - they lack confidence. "Help" menus may have gotten considerably better over the years (so I now tell people to try them first), but they gave up on them years ago, when they lacked useful (step-by-step) information and were difficult to navigate.
What's needed is a set of evolving program layouts - from "Minimal" to "Full" (essentially Novice to Expert), with a simple search tool to allow users to find features when they are first needed and then allow users add them to the toolbars and menus (perhaps leaving them in some sort of "highlighted" mode for the first week or so).
GL
There are the traditionalists - those who stick to painting, drawing and sculpture The pragmatists - best tool for the job. Technophiles - use a computer unless forced to do otherwise.
Of course, everyone is somewhere between the three, but those are the major groups.
I try to be pragmatic, though I used to be a hardcore technophile. Sketching general ideas with a pencil on paper is faster than sitting down in front of Adobe Illustrator.
It's much easier and less time consuming to get a clean final piece using digital media.
My older coworkers used to paint layouts with airbrushes and frisket (mask). They'll never go back because of "Undo".
Sig Applied For
How anyone could want to use vi or emacs over TextPad is beyond me. Even NEdit doesn't cut it next to TextPad.
Most of my writing I start in BBEdit. I copy into Appleworks to add bolding and italics, formatting, and for printing.
Considering giving TextEdit more of a try though...
*honks*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
I prefer LyX. I've done two of my wife's theses with it, and really like the simple interface, the 'programability', and especially the quality of the output.
I guess I don't get the problem. Sure, Word is loaded with a ton of features, and most people use maybe 10% of them at the most. But I've written tons of stuff using Word, a bit with FrameMaker, and before that, WordPerfect, and before that, a portable Smith-Corona that hummed and clunked with every keystroke. But whatever tool I was using to write, I never felt compelled to spend time twiddling with the formatting and trying to decide which font to use.
Just sit down, open a blank document and start writing, dammit. If you can't keep your hands off the Format menu and focus on your job, then YOU have a problem, not the program you use.
And guess what. You can turn off the AutoCorrect and AutoFormat features if they piss you off. Geez, even when Clippy was first introduced, it took me about 30 seconds to figure out how to turn him off, too.
If someone told me I had to write my next project using Notepad, I'd do it. If I had to do it with vi, I might bitch a bit, because as others have noted, vi is a bitch to learn, but then I'd do the job. Use the tool you need to use.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
Vim is great for keyboard re-configuration. However, it has a quirky way of operating that would be difficult to teach, and would apparently never operate correctly with Control-key editing commands.
My favorite editor for both computer source code and word processing documents is the free, open-source, Python-powered Leo programmer's outliner and editor: http://leo.sourceforge.net/
Leo lets you work with outlines and it can associate any portion of the outline with a flat file for processing by compilers or typesetters like LaTeX. So for word processing in particular, I like to write inside a Leo outline using LaTeX formatting codes and then export and process the final result using LaTeX to create a PDF.
But one of the problems Dickinson mentioned in the article was a bunch of quotation marks magically appearing in the wrong font. It would take great stoicism to ignore this and keep writing, even though you know the audience will never see that.
My son, who's now in high school, stopped using Word and installed YeahWrite (there is free-as-in-beer version) and uses that for homework.
I think I'll teach him LaTex next, so that he will be ready for college.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Some people are predisposed to use command line tools like Vi. These are the same people who correct everyone on spelling and grammar. They easily retain factual information like the capital of this or that etc. These kinds of people are also predisposed to writing so the conclusions of the above article's author is not surprising.
Personally I have a hard time remembering arbitrary commands and facts. Unless I can visualize something, can fit it into some relationship, or have some emotional connection to a bit of information; chances are it won't make it past my short short term memory. Being a web programmer I need to have access to reference material at all times. There are common functions that I have looked up at least a hundred times.
I know people who are severely dyslexic who I went to school with. These people would be hard pressed to do anything on a computer outside of a GUI. On that note I recommend AbiWord to any one who lacks command line mind.
Although, it would be nice if AbiWord had a grammar checker and a more durable spell checker. Spelling and grammar should be an electronic formating standard. We should code spelling and grammar formating software as close to the current implementation of language as we can an then accept new the electronic implementation as correct grammar. That way we don't have to worry about spelling and grammar anymore. If our word processor validates our writings than that's the final word on their correctness.
Grammar is just a means of repressing the vernacular. Why not give the task the heartless machine? That would be preferable to the army sadists we have now.
You might want to check out WordPerfect for DOS Updated (also found at http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/).
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I don't know how many other people do this, but when I want to just "let the words flow" while I'm at the computer, I shut off the monitor. It becomes too hard to edit/second-guess myself, so I can get on with the task of writing. Then I have a good chunk of text all ready to slice, dice and spell-correct to my heart's content when the monitor comes back on.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I'm a writer who embraces word proccessing for exactly that- proccessing my words. For input I have an Olympus digital voice recorder, and Dragon Naturally Speaking for speach to text editing. I don't write on a computer-it's completely unnatural- I proccess words. Frankly, the only natural way for most people to get thoughts out of their brain and into the world is to say them.
Text Editor and Corrector
Used it on a Teletype terminal, 1 inch paper tape. Hooked up to a DEC PDP 10. Used it to process, concatenate, and reduce data files to spiffy SAS plots. The flat file database was something called 1022, no idea who published it. Overnight, of course, so no mistakes were allowable.
Had to think before typing.
Yep, Vi is definately the right choice for typing up documents initially (at least, if they don't need any funny characters). It is not easy to use at first, but it does provide exceptional power and speed once you understand how it works (most importantly, the difference between command mode and text-entry mode). After a couple of days to a couple of weeks of using Vi, you will be able to really fly through document creation and editing.
On the other hand, if you need any funny characters or formatting, you'll need more than Vi. Of course, you should start out with Vi, but then you'll need something else. Like LyX, which is a WYSIWYW docuemnt-processor. It allows the document-creator to avoid the details of formatting. You could create a document in Vi, paste it into Lyx, and then use LyX to format it.
Of course, you'd be best off if you knew how to use LaTeX (LyX is just a front-end for LaTeX). Then you could use LaTeX as you were writing in Vi.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I use:
cat >file
Works every time. No distractions.
It's the only editor that is guaranteed to be present on a UNIX system. Now that I wrote that, someone will post a counterexample. I've used old systems that predated vi, they always had /bin/ed.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It's more than a little scary to see that this particular piece of information, 'Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!', The basis of an ad for a monster truck event has enjoyed such enormous longevity.
It must be one of the most successful pieces of advertising copy *ever* written. More memorable than, 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing,' or, 'Where's the beef?!'
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Aren't we all writers, christ, it seems that everyone who's ever put pen to paper fancies themselves a writer. I fancy myself a pedant, and that's really what matters, honesty.
Personally, I write with anything on hand, at times this has included crayons and placemats, for the most part it is either mechnical pencils (or pen) in some notebook (any notebook) or on computer. The thing is that my handwriting is terrible, so I try to restrict myself to the computer only.
Being that I am not a tech-geek, I use Windows and Word works just fine, just like every other writing progam that has ever existed since the beginning of time, you type something in on the keyboard and it outputs it on the screen.
Sure, sometimes I have problems with the automatic formatting, but it is easily turned off, and if I really want to spell check and edit a document I just print it out and go over it, because no matter what some people might say, it's easier that way.
Really... how this article got on slashdot beats the hell out of me. I hate to tell the author but perhaps his biggest problem is more a matter of age then anything. Authors of the digital generation are comfortible with word processors as much as anything... as are many authors from the pre-digital generation for that matter. Douglas Adams pops immediatly to mind, and im assuming this is an author most slashdotters are familar with.
So in the end... this boils down to an article about a guy who doesnt like progress, or is too damned lazy to dedicate himself to learning something new. Dont get me wrong, these people are everywhere... I have hundreds of people ( mostly 45+ years of age, btw... ) who would just love to see computers go away, email to burn in hell... and for everybody to have an in/out set of boxes sitting on their desks. Why? Because they grew up using a different system and never felt comfortible in the end.
So, as it stands... this particular fellow settled on VI, as its the most basic interface he could find. If he found most GUI word processors too convoluted... I guarantee you, he didnt get much into the advanced features of VI either. Christ, he could have gotten by using notepad... or DOS EDIT for that matter... if there wasnt a 64K file limit.
But there are two morals to this story I suppose... Perhaps the default install of office suites should be more.... um basic in the feature department... You turn things on as you need them. Then again... novelists arent exactly the default target that {hint,hint}OFFICE suites are aimed at anyways, now are they?
The second possible moral... perhaps there is a target afterall for tablet PC. All these people that thing the pen is king and the computer is evil... well... perhaps they have the compremise they need. I have tested out two tablet PC's to date, and I have to admit, they are pretty slick. My three biggest complaints sofar are 1) it doesnt have the tactile feel of paper... not even close... so your writing at least till trained, is a bit altered 2) they are fairly slow, when compared to a comprable laptop. Must be alot of software overhead... 3) too damned expensive... but this will solve itself in time ( in fact, already has started to ).
Although, except perhaps as a niche market... that last thing I ever *EVER* want to see, is developers start targeting for the luddite markets! Its bad enough our education system already caters to the lowest common denominator!
Sorry... im vented now...
you can set the preferences for whether it defaults to .txt. or .rtf
.rtf doesn't quite seem to be vanilla, other rtf readers sometimes have problems with it.
Mind you, it's
That right there is the biggest difference. Most "Writers" are writing for the pleasure of writing. The fact that you're rushing to put the words on paper is what they are trying to avoid. If it's worth saying, you should be able to remember it long enough to write it down!
Also, computers get in the way for lots of people. I'm still old enough that pen and paper is much easier for important drafts than sitting at a computer [cursing Bill G] for hours. I'm still a wacko that likes to write code out before ever wasting time at the PC typing it in. Computers are too busy [and I'm a sysadmin]---when most people want quiet to think clearly.
It's the difference between craft and production. Why restore an old car by hand when you can get a new one factory-fresh for cheaper? Because the act of writing is the art, not the presentation..someone else will make those choices anyway..Why waste time and fustration on them before creating the actual work.
What I would love to find and buy, if anyone ever made one yet, is a WRITERs PC.
e .htm
This special computer is reminenscent of the Tandy TRS Model 100
http://osaki.cool.ne.jp/hc/index.html If you remember, it was used by almost everyone in journalism in its day.
The WRITERs PC would be:
a Small Portable Folding CLAMSHELL (not a tablet) with:
a Full Sized Backlit Keyboard, with full sized keys (no chicklets) This feature is very important for a writer.
a Flat Screen B/W Monitor (NO touch screen) to match the keyboard's Size and Shape, but it would need to be bright and readable, say 800 x 480 pixels on a twelve in wide screen.
No need for a Hard Drive, as Word (RTF) Files are small. instead it should have a 1GB Flash Memory Drive for data storage.
http://www.zyonsystems.com/usbflashdriv
Also No Need for the fastest CPU or lots of RAM. (It would not need web surfing, but you would want email).
Such a computer should have 100 Hours of Battery Life. http://alphasmart.com/products/dana_overview.html
Obviously such a minimal laptop would not need the bloatware or monstrous OS from Microsoft, but it would be a very useable and useful laptop with the ultra small and stable Linux OS, and running only a text editor and a Mail app from.
No one makes the WRITERs PC yet. (I would be willing to pay any price you name for this one!) Such a portable device would sell very well for the millions of us who write, IMO.
Whoever created this would have the market completely to themselves, I believe.
Thank you for your time.
Regards,
Roger Born
Writer, Teacher, General Troublemaker
http://writing.borngraphics.com/
Found this after searching for a min.. not a bad list:
o ce ss.html
http://www.bizoffice.com/soft_wordprocessing_pr
++dez;
http://WebSearch.COM.AU
Lyx
As an amature writer myself, I find the best tool for writing is the network itself.
At different times I like to write in different environments. Sometimes, sitting at the desk with a full sized screen provides me with the best setup. Othertimes, depending on mood, sitting in bed with my laptop works best.
With the network, I can go wherever I want and the work will always be saved on my central server. Even if I'm 1,000 miles away I can access my network remotly and dabble with works in process.
The Internet is generally stupid
Bear in mind that Dickinson is not doing anything new. Software to support exactly this kind of writing has been around for decades. There are even SGML DTDs to process simple hand-formatted text. And no, you don't need tags -- these are simply the default convention in SGML. You can write a DTD that says that a double line break is a paragraph tag, and a word surrounded by asterisks is an emphasis.
It's always irritated me that there's so much software for presenting ultra-cool content, but only the most primitive tools for creating that content. In the mid 80s, there was a flurry of "thought processors" (basically outliners, though they often had clever features for rearranging and associating content). Alas, they never caught on. (Yes I know, some are still around. Selling like hotcakes, aren't they?) I think this is mainly because businesses drive most desktop software development, and they only are interested in features they can see.
While I can't speak for the author, I didn't take this as a vi ad, per se (and vi is my editor or choice for almost everything!)
I took it as an endorsement of vi *and similarly simple yet powerful editors*. Things that let you just do the job. Things that don't try to do a bunch of extra stuff. Things that don't encourage you to major in the minors.
I use vi because it just works, and is generally available on everything I use. With the exception of Windows, I don't even have to chase it down; it's just there. If I used VMS, I guess I'd have to chase vi down- or maybe I'd just revert to EDT. I've learned way too many editors over the years, and forgotten most of them. vi is nearly ubiquititous, easy and powerful, so I use it.
But if joe, or nEdIt, or whatever works for you, great. But for serious writing- no matter how complex- keep it simple.
I think that's partly because artists like to clearly understand the rules of the game. How much came from the tools and how much from the artist. When the rools are rapdily changing, it's hard for one artist to assess the work of another.
I guess photography was upsetting because it threatened to cheapen representation. Once photography became fairly standard, the rules of the game were obvious and we could seriously compare the efforts of different photographers.
Another, subtler aspect is the creator's refusal to be overwhelmed by his tools. The tools should be quiet, neutral, responsive to the vision of the creator. They should not bear their own personality.
I think I still have my copy of Word Processing on the UNIX System, which served as a pretty good troff reference. The author seriously advocated using ed for editing, which makes some sense: it's universally available on Unix systems, it's very fast, and typesetting with troff doesn't require special formatting, so a line-oriented editor is no handicap.
To deal with the font problem when using ps2pdf I use \usepackage{times}. Abode pdf reader is then happy.
The other way I have of making pdf files is to have a printer defined (I use the HPLJ4 driver) and set it to output to a postscript file. Then use ps2pdf to convert it to pdf. Have had good results with that. Also means any application that can print can generate a pdf.
I am currently studing and they force us to hand write all our notes during the lecture. Anyway I like to re-type these notes. Currently I'm at about 200 pages and Word is annoying slow - at creating bullet points. Its damn annoying!
HWO cna yuo be sooooooo smartey man too saev teh tiem liek taht on yuor LUNIX SYSTME???????
pls teahc me yuor COMPUTAR JEDI WAYYS!!!!!
Ever notice how many "writers" attempt to prove this by saying how low tech they are or with their alcholism? The same as many "artists" don't even consider what's expressed in pixels, preferring something created with a canvas, diarrhea, and a jet fan.
In touch with creative side, I get drunk, have sex, and then go express myself on the walls of my cave. Beat that.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mg&se ktion=1
Anything else would be hypocritical.
One also does screenwriting. Technology allows him to live where he pleases. If treatments, drafts, and changes relied on a typewrtiter and US Mail or Fed-Ex he'd be screwed. These things must still be entered in a computer and then distributed to directors, cast, etc.
Besides how many rewrites would you want to do on 1200 page manuscript with an old Olympia?
My favorite word processors, in chronological order, have been:
ST Writer (Atari ST)
ST Writer Elite (Atari ST)
Those were anachronistic relics even in the mid-to-late 1980s when I used them, as WYSIWYG was already starting to take over. But I had little patience with on-screen rulers, tab and margin stops, page breaks, and nonsense like that.
Transcript (Amiga)
Transwrite (Amiga)
These were sort of hybrid semi-WYSIWYG programs (they showed italics and bold text on the screen!), and they were small and highly efficient. They could also be used as decent text editors for programming.
TextEdit (Mac OS X)
I think TextEdit is the ultimate writing tool. No, it doesn't do footnotes, it doesn't do formulas. It doesn't output HTML, or integrate with spreadsheets or presentation software. It's a word processor, it does word processing. The user interface is completely Mac-like and easy to understand.
Also, it can output in either ASCII text or RTF, so I don't have to worry about having documents in some unreadable format if I ever change word processors again -- not that I foresee changing at all.
Writing. . . Does anybody remember writing?
I know Sun simply bought StarOffice, and that Scott McNeally said it a long time ago, but StarOffice (even when it takes the form of the OpenOffice 1.1.0 release candidate I know like to use) is valiantly attempting to match Microsoft Office's bloat factor, and must by now be at 0.8 in that respect. But I like one particular feature about the bloated text editor that comes with it (or is actually and irritatingly part of the same process).
What I like is that for the program to suggest how a word is going to end (Word Completion), I do not first need to tell it which words it is supposed to offer up, as with Microsoft Word, which I am regularly forced to use by my clients' requirements. Instead, OpenOffice kindly remembers some 9000 words that are longer than 5 characters for me (I tweaked the number of words a bit, can't even remember what the default number is).
I translate (technical) books for a living, and having a built-in word completion feature like this, that bases suggestions on what I have previously entered in as useful words for that document (a document could easily hold up to 80,000 words, depending on the book and on the state of completion of the translation, of course), is immensely useful.
Nevertheless, OpenOffice almost never gets in my way anymore. OK, I had to turn off a lot of features that are probably very useful for writing half-page letters, but get in your way after about three pages, and I had to find a proper font as well as a way to tell the program (I was going to say "tool") to make that choice of font stick, but after that, and after subsequent upgrades to newer versions up to the current one (where's me final 1.1.0?) I have never experienced such trouble again. I almost never visit the menus (pahh!), except for nice new features such as Export to PDF and for the way to the ever-irritating print settings dialogs (so basically, I can use it by opening the File menu once in a while).
Now if only OpenOffice had a half-decent Dutch spell checker, I could do entirely without MSWord (which has a half-decent one, not a decent one), which after typing a mere 25 pages or so, starts running in circles; looping endlessly; a problem most likely to be fixed in the release after the upcoming release.
JeR
I'm a very non-professional writer. Some of you may have heard of Nanowrimo, where contestants try to write a fifty thousand word novel in a month. I heard about it on slashdot after registrations had closed two years ago and thought - this is for me! So I spoke to some friends (and many of them happen to be choristers) and we decided to run our own festival in December with basically the same premise: use any means to write a fifty thousand word novel in a calendar month. Being December you get an extra day, too. We called it 'Choristers and Others Writing On Holiday' ('cowoh'). And we've run it again once since. Anyway. I use vim (ahdore.com/craig/vim/.vimrc), and cvs, and can show the progress of my novel from beginning to end. The unix command line tools are great for composition. I have bash scripts for word count, planning, opening sections and all that.
The last website was written with jsp on tomcat3 (had an old binary laying around), postgresql 7.x and linux 2.2 running on a K62 with 256MB. It was the biggest hack I've ever written. I started with three patterns of jsp and had a weekend to do it, and managed to mangle those patterns to produce the site: word count, entrant diaries, a news section, and "top ten" portlets and the like. Nevertheless it lasted the festival, and then I destroyed it (leaving the database).
I'm currently redeveloping our website, and plan to diverge from the nanowrimo theme a lot more this time around. In addition to the old features, I want to have a comprehensive registration and profiles section; some sort of scheme for uploading daily changes; and automatic source control. I'm also writing some tools so that the data will be automatically composed into a formatted pdf at the end of the festival. Hopefully these measures will encourage people to use plain text and learn the benefits wonderful tools you can use to work with it.
We're based in Adelaide, but currently have competitors from around Australia. We're fairly small, but open to new people, and hoping to do another festival before the end of the year. My email is craig at ahdore / com.
Believe with me, my saplings.
One thing I just don't understand is what all these "distractions" from word/openoffice are? I mean are they really so overwhelmed by choice of buttons to press?
So far alot of people just want the basics - put text on the page. I can understand that. Writing plays however does require some formatting, it's not the blocks of text for articles and novels. Specific formatting represents definite areas of interest - dialogue, stage instructions, scene changes and transitions etc. Different people are reading the script for different reasons.
There are several excellent stage/screen play tools out there but none of them are free. I have half considered trying to write one OSS.
I spent 25 minutes writing a template and style for Word, turn off all the toolbars (that's part of the template automatically), added some drop down menus of commonly used terms and instructions and created a floating toolbar of character names for quick dialogue insertion.
After that I type.
There are some important points to remember though.
1) Plays rarely go for more than 100 pages (I wouldn't use Word for large docs - I've tried with much stress).
2) I wouldn't use Word where there is significant diagramming (such as tech docs).
3) I still don't believe that its ready for so called "collaborative" editing, although it is improving and still well ahead of some other document processors.
The moaning about distractions seems pretty tiny to me when you can turn them off (and keep them off) so easily.
I just can't be bothered.
The tool to use is, yes, a Pentel 0.5mm mechanical pencil. But the clear choice among them is not the finger-clicker model, but the Forte Pro, with rubber finger grip/pad, metal clip, and plastic cap over the eraser.
I write a lot.
When I'm writing fiction, it almost invariably ballpoint pen on a spiral notebook. (black ink)
When I'm writing poetry or letters, it's a fountain pen on unlined paper. (black ink)
When I'm writing technical documentation or other essays and works along those lines, I too use vi. Green text on black background. I, of course, important this into OpenOffice to format and make it look proffesional, but I can't do any serious writing in a word processor.
In my opinion word processors are NOT for scribing text. They are for formatting and "processing" text. Text that I (and many serious writers I know) compile elsewhere first.
Sig.i>
I always jumped at the newest alternative, so going to text from graphics was actually an update for me.
BeOS is dead, long live Linux. Linux may be a little harder to set up (especially if you do as I reccomend, use Gentoo, but that's for another religeous war). I'd choose vim over vi, because vim has some new features, but never fear, it's fully compatable with vi -- such that if you type 'vi' on most modern Linux boxes, vim comes up.
Don't try emacs, it's almost an OS in itself. You might like it, but I'd suggest you don't try it.
So happy vim!
And use xml/xslt. It may take awhile to learn, but it does something really critical -- it separates your content from presentation. That way, you focus on writing and creating content in vi, and you can always format it and lay it out (VERY quickly and easily) later on for the web (html) or for printing (postscript) or even (gasp) for Windows people (word). In fact, XML is durable and flexible enough that one XML document could last forever (or as long as modern English does) in its original form, just having its content presented differently as new formats came along.
But overall, I think it's really a great story. BeOS isn't bad, but if you're still using it, read up on Open Source -- that's why Linux is good.
Finally, don't shun the graphical interface when you need something done fast. Just use something like AbiWord. Lightweight and fast, but it will do everything you need it to.
I now have a 1/2" thick laptop (actually a sub-notebook) with Linux on it. It has replaced at least one 3 or 4 inch thick school book (I'm in high school) and quite a lot of paper I'd be taking notes on.
I'd say, don't be so paranoid of new technology, but after you learn something, if it isn't good, unlearn it. That way, I know vim is the best alternative, because I've tried everything else (except TeX).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Im amazed at the number of real writers who read Slashdot and actually took the time to comment on this article. There opinions have been enlightening because i have often wondered wether Word was just getting in the way. Thank you.
Ha! Wimp!
I write all of my works using direct binary output from obfuscated perl regex expressions.
Sig.i>
Fifteen or more years ago I was a lab assistant at a community college and I watched as a room full of students failed to complete a word processing assignment. They had been given a "starting document" and printed copy; the assignment was to make the starting document match the printed copy. One of them finally turned to me in utter dispair and after I made her look around at all the trouble everyone was having (and after I told her how "bad" her teacher must have been) I gave her the four simple rules of electronic document preparation:
(In Order)
1) Content. Get all the words and ideas you desire to express into the system.
2) Correctness. Go after the grammar and spelling, make sure that each thought really makes sense.
3) Grouping. Check your punctuation (again) and your paragraph breaks. Make tables and inset boxes.
4) Presentation. Now that everything is said, you are free to highlight, bold, etc. Do your colors and fonts and drop in your pictures if you want.
As you grow with a tool you may find that you can do several of these steps at once. A *rare* person can do all four at the same time as long as he keeps them in the above order in mental priority, ready at any moment to abandon any higher numbered step in favor of paying needed attention to a lower.
If you apply these steps to your process, either for the whole document, or for chapters, or sections or whatever "largest comfortable" segment works for you, you will never have trouble with your tools distrupting your workflow.
The pointless stalls happen when a person jumps over a step. They pick a font size and such so that the text looks just so, then they find a spelling or punctuation error and what was one bold banner across the page is now a two-line peel-away that has bumped half of the following text into some oblivion of the next page.
Back to the anticdote, she got her work done and blew the curve for the class.
(BTW: I didn't get much beyond step one in composing this post. I am blowing off stress and wasting time under deadline pressure just now, and the slashdot interface does not lend itself well to spellcheck... 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I have had problems with embedded fonts using the command sequence:
latex file.tex
dvips -o file.ps file.dvi
ps2pdf file.ps
Eventually I was able to fix it by using a newer version of ghostscript and adding some font path locations. Really felt like a hack job.
Now I'm through with using vanilla LaTeX and instead use pdflatex:
pdflatex file.tex
That command generates pdf files directly (no dvi) and with really nice fonts. The only caveat is you can no longer embed eps files into you document -- you have to embed pdf files instead. I use epstopdf to generate the pdf files. Good luck!
I agree that the problem with this situation is that people don't want to learn, but the people who don't want to do the learning (as usual) are the programmers (specifically those of Word) who are designing the bad user interfaces.
If the programmers at Microsoft had actually taken the time to read fine manuals about software usability, they would obviously have known that having both an "Options" menu selection and a "Customize" menu section is ambiguous and exceptionally bad user interface design. In fact, Word is even worse than that; the places you have to go to turn off annoying stuff (which should have been turned off by default in the first place) are spread throughout the entire damn program. There is no one single preferences area for configuring options in Word. And that's what so many people stumble over and why they call their friends at 3AM in the morning.
Ergonomica Auctorita
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
As for *nix console text editors, I use pico. One doesn't have to memorize arcane commands, it has a bottom horizontal menu with simple control character commands just like the old BBS text editors. Finding it is easy enough, google is your friend.
Tech Public Policy stuff
When running Windows, Abiword is an excellent little open source editor with all kinds of features, but at under 5 megs, no bloat. Version 2.0 just came out. Go download a copy today.
-FL
I really don't see the need to push people into such modern tools as writing. My office has a long and glorious oral tradition - memos and reports are told and retold in meter and verse from generation to generation. Vice presidents sit down around the conference table, dim the lights and recite tales to human resource specialists and administrative assistants from years past.
My favorite is 'June 1974 Quarterly Report'. There's a lovely passage toward the end regarding a change in depreciation schedules to compensate for an adjustment in equipment maintenance. The way the syllables shorten through the passage suggests to the listener that profits are being rapidly lost, but suddenly the word usage changes to a more relaxed pace when the P&L values are stated. Spellbinding!
I don't know why nobody else has mentioned it ... LyX is LaTeX without needing to know the LaTeX command set (or have to type \emph{} every time you want italics, etc :). For writing large documents without any distractions it's perfect.
Not that I'd use LyX for day-to-day word processing - that's what OOo is for ... Pity there's not a LaTeX import/export filter in OOo, though ...
btw - couldn't resist:
And speaking of graphical editors, have you experienced the pain of having your careful setup, with a new page for every chapter, completely ruined by adding one line to the second paragraph of the first chapter?
That's what the "Insert Page Break" function is for :)
This guy doesn't even give credit to vi's predecessors.
You know, i, ii, iii, iv, and v.
Yes, of course Mr. Spoilsport that's
Of course the two-way sneeze through windvents would be great for my geeky brother, and the climate control that emulates Ancient Egypt or Tropical Paradise would delight a world traveller, but I'm just a guy who writes.
Look Mr.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I used to carry around a PDA for taking notes and jotting down poetry on the go... a sleek Handspring Edge, equipped with Wordsmith anodized blue. It was a royal pain inputting text in graphitti, and the folding keyboard was a little too much geek to use while sitting at the bar. I still use the combo for rough drafts on-the-go, when I don't wanna lug around the Powerbook... in the winter they fit into my jacket pockets, and in the summer, they fit into a small backpack or briefcase. But they don't go everywhere with me.
What goes everywhere with me is a Moleskine notebook... a tiny, leatherbound notebook with a zillion pages and a ribbon bookmark. I use a tiny Filcao Forever fountain pen to write whatever I would in it. Since it's all rough drafts and need to be re-written anyway, entering the worthwhile stuff it into the computer isn't much of a chore.
On word processing:
As a slam poet, quasi-professional technology pundit and wannabe fiction author, my writing tools are very, very important to me.
I was brought up in the ways of Quick Brown Fox for the Commodore 64, and then moved to MS Works for DOS. These programs sucked mightily, as did the weenie word processor that came with the Tandy 1000HX.
Then I got my Mac. A used Mac Portable "luggable", three years obsolete, with a pirated copy of MS Word 5.0.1. It was like going from a WWI Biplane to an X-Wing fighter.
Then I tried Write Now, a now defunt word processor from a small company, and it quickly became my tool of choice. It did all the things a Mac should do well: wysiwyg editing and formatting on the fly, easily configured stylesheets and headers/footers, and absolutely no clutter. You had a window to type in, with a little toolbar at the top you could easily turn on and off with one click, and that's it. Everything else was in easily navigated menus and dialog boxes.
When they went out of business, I switched to Mariner Write, but wasn't very happy with it. Then I discovered Nissus, a Mac-only Word Processor, and it was heaven. All the power of Word, with none of the bullshit.
Now I use MacOS X's "Textedit" and use InDesign to format stuff that isn't going to be published on the web. This is starting to cramp my style a little bit, so I'm going back to Nissus, now that it's OS X native.
SoupIsGood Food
Notepad.
Many creative people are resistant to new technology. However, creative people are also usually the first adopters of new technology. Consider Mark Twain with the typewriter, or Douglas Adams with the Mac. Yes, many artists refuse to accept digital photography as art. But it isn't Joe Sixpack who is buying $40,000 high-resolution digital cameras--artists are doing that.
Instead of that, they do something REALLY time-efficient, like learn vi or XyWrite. (cough)
All this talk of formatting, fonts and styles. Why so much bitching and moaning about a rather unimportant subject?
In most modern text editors (I guess vim could be considered modern), you set the font for the entire project before you even start typing. I know in certain situations different fonts are required in the same project, but those are few and far between (humor me).
As for formatting, ever heard of doing that in the writing process? It's rather quite easy. I can type up a 30 p. project in 8 hours and never have to worry about format or font(font being set at beginning), because I actively format the entire project in the writing process. When you finish a paragraph, hit Enter then press Tab. It's that easy.
I know the most common argument is going to be "Not possible when writing several drafts!". That's a complete load of BS. How hard is it to move your pinky up and to the left less than 1/2 inch to hit the Tab button? If you actively format even your rough drafts, formatting never has to be worried about again (just make sure your Ins mode isn't on replace) for the rest of the project. It takes less that 1 minute per 10 pages to do so, and is well worth the effort (did a study, sadly enough).
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Well what about it? Am I the only person on the planet that still uses those 2 old work horses together?
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Everything I write these days is written in vi. When I need print quality I just feed plain text to groff.
Jacek Artymiak
freelance consultant and writer
master of many a page
I like using Outline view in Word when I'm working on documentation. It makes it easy to break down the document into logical areas. I don't have to worry about styling, just which level each scetion is.
I guess there are other outlining tools around
This is an interesting discussion because as a writer, I feel for the author when he spends more time formatting and learning the word processor than ever writing. One can lose oneself forever with futzing and tinkering and never get a damned thing done during the day.
.txt, .html, or XML formats so that one's content can be imported to any other program. And if this is not your game, check out the sheer speed and simplicity of TextMaker (www.softmaker.de) - it's cheap, fast, will do 90% of what Word does and hey, only takes up 18Mb on your HD!
However, the UltraEdit Text Editor (www.ultraedit.com) allows not only spacing, justification, and font selection, but will save the document in
Either way, you'll spend a minimal amount of time futzing with the program, if at all.
Its sad to hear that you can't use courier outside of college. Its like a penal implant for papers. Pump on courier and POOF, you paper has an extra page for every three. Die times new roman. And papers that use a word count instead. Grrrrr.
Open Source Sushi
I want to bring up *text* by myself not any fucking helps, let alone concentrate on other automatics. Oh oh, while you're at it, why don't you bring up some genious plan to turn off all these autofeatures on all workstations in all offices so we can collectively save tens of thousands of minutes of worktime.
Don't tell me, next you'll probably suggest bringing up help for walking since MS Walk "helps" user by inserting automatically extra steps thus tripping user and preventing him to run alltogether.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
I agree we should concentrate on content ratehr than formatting but going all the way to using vi seems a little minimalist given the other tools avaialable.
The only thing I miss for MS Word is the ability to review changes and that is as dangerous as it is useful.
You may be an editor but evidently not a script editor.
For your reading pleasures I have done this in isospeced fonts.
I find it rather amusing that with Tex (and thus also LaTeX) the line- and page breaks are far superior to anything MS has created, and TeX is getting old now.
Just look at the orphan and widow protection and you will see what I mean.
Another comparison: you get money for finding real bugs in the original TeX program (web, isn't it). You will not even get a reply from MS if you report a bug i Word.
The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) uses (La)TeX as part of the tool chain to created hardcopy versions and it looks rather nice and professional. Some complain about alleged ugliness in the font Computer Modern but I rather like it.
Many recruiters just don't understand the idea of anything that is not in .Doc format.
My attempts to explain how MS-Word can be used with text; seems only to confuse and frighten the recruiters.
Wouldn't Pico/Nano, or something like DOS edit be better than Vi? They don't even have "modes", it's just text and arrow keys, much simpler. Vi really annoys me by forcing me to go back and forth between "modes" and constantly hitting the escape key. "oh, did I INSERT, I meant APPEND. STUPID ME! I better hit the escape key and go back and try again!"
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Yes, the P205 is definitely one of the finest hand-writing implements. They last forever, too; I'm on my third in about 25 years.
.5mm rapidograph. That was the epitome of pens, as far as I was concerned. Unfortunately, if you don't use 'em every day, they clog up with dried ink. They also respond really badly to plane trips, and tend to leak if carried around in a bag. I tried a rapidoliner. It was good, and cheaper than a rapidograph set, but suffered the same clogging and leaking problems.
My problem has been finding an ink-based equivalent of the P205, for situations where you can't write in pencil.
I used to write with a Rotring
I think I may have found a decent alternative, though. It's the Sanford (rotring) uni ball Gel RT. It feels almost as good as a rapidograph, the lines are nice and even, but it's practical for everyday use and cheap enough that you can keep a box of them in the office.
It's strange how the writing process is so affected by the physical aesthetics of writing implements.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It came with a task switcher (this was DOS after all), and did an excellent job of taking my tables from the spreadsheet program and dropping them into WordPerfect completely perfectly.
This was all on a 10MHz 286, too! I often wonder just how fast any of the old DOS programs would run on a modern machine.
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
Good luck to the rest of the world...I'm a third year in a creative writing program and I've written a few essays in vi over the years, but I can tell you the chance of my classmates learning vi is about the same as my chance of coming up with a dazzling metaphor for the end of this sentence before my boredom eclipses the sheer fun of typing, like an annular eclipse eclipsing most, but not all, of the sun.
No, that was not dazzling... Ergo, odds = 0.
As for me, I've been happily using Abiword 2.0 since... three days ago. Wordperfect 'til then. Death to WORD!
Some years ago, I noticed that I was doing almost none of my writing in Microsoft Word. I used Word to save and to print, but I was writing most text in AOL documents. When I realized this, I started using Apple's Stickies software, and I've found that to be the best solution. I don't have to look at even one foolish toolbar, and I can easily open, re-size, re-color, and re-arrange multiple windows -- allowing me to essentially write on digital 'notecards,' which is particularly useful in speechwriting.
My two cents.
crib
Please don't read my journal
It's been what, about 10 years and I haven't found a word processor since which lets me get the job done faster. Nothing on Linux, nothing on Windows, nothing on Mac. They all get in the way with how clever they are trying to be.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You convinced me into doing some research, and everything out there seems to suggest that it's quite an incredible word processor. Consequently I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be any open source clone, which is a shame, and that everyone who still likes it seems to be going to great lengths to run the ancient DOS version on modern systems.
Do you have any idea if there are any open source apps out there that are trying to clone or work like XyWrite? I simply haven't been able to find any after a moderate search.
...the tech writer's MAIN job (in my experience) is to supply the presentation and formatting to largely-existing content.
Argh. No no no no. That's a misconception. Maybe some writers work that way (over on Techwr-L we call them "font fondlers") but most of us don't--or at least the good ones don't.
Typically I either (a) start from scratch, interviewing subject matter experts and doing my own research; or for some short docs, (b) get a "draft" from the subject matter experts that I then edit, expand on, overhaul, or chuck out the window and totally rewrite (depending on the quality of the draft). Rarely does even one sentence stand unchanged.
Surely you don't try to generate complete documentation -- for a non-trivial amount of information -- including both the content AND the finalized presentation all at once?
Sure I do. I'll tweak formatting later on, but generally I do most of the headers/layout tables/graphics/bold/styles/etc at roughly the same time as the writing. (Working with screen captures is usually a nice break from writing, and gives me something painless to do on sluggish-brain mornings before I'm ready to tackle verbal nuances.) I sure don't write it all and then go back and add formatting.
Seeing the formatting--headers, bold, tables, boxes--helps me visualize the structure of what I'm working on.
I would think you'd go back when you're done and worry about consistent presentation, additional formatting, etc.
I go back and proofread for formatting just about the same way I proofread for writing and technical accuracy.
Neil Stephenson discussed Quicksilver, his newest novel and the first book of his Baroque Cycle and associated matters, on the evening of 24 Sept at the First Congregational Church on SW Park in Puddletown.
The Baroque Cycle deals w/ the ancestors of characters in Cryptonomicon. Two more volumes of the BC have been mostly written. He decided to write the BC during Cryptonomicon, and started in 1997.
He writes and does the first edits in longhand w/ a fountain pen. Text written this way is "frozen" for a long time and is better for it.
He believes there's a mental buffer which holds the next thought. The text in that buffer is plastic and easily improved, but once the words on paper, much more difficult to revise. The quality of his first drafts are better because they are in the buffer longer.
Writing is a craft, more than an intellectual activity, and the motions used to write influence the result. No great literature will ever be written by someone with a jack in their head.
Once the Baroque Cycle is complete, he has no plan for what's next, but he finds he likes historical writing better. It's also safer than wr1ting the future.
(More notes from his talk, including commentary on vi vs EMACS, and the infamous DENTAL EXTRQACTON SCENE, will be posted in the October 2003 issue of The Pulsar, the monthly journal of the Portland (Oregon) Science Fiction Society
http://www.porsfis.org
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
I'm using pdflatex for a collection of technical documents that run to in excess of 2000 pages each. I'm using epstopdf to make pdf images for inclusion. It works well except for a group of engineers that can't be bothered to actually set their save options.
The documents are heavily cross-referenced and indexed. One group insists on using MS Word and Acrobat Distiller. At this time, the documents cannot be produced with hyperlinks enabled -- Distiller often runs for upwards of a day without completing. When it does finish, the hyperlink boxes are shifted slightly.
Using pdflatex, I can manufacture the same document in just under 10 minutes, and it has all the hyperlinks, and they're properly placed.
When I'm writing parts of this document, I give no thought to formatting, but I do mark up for semantic content.
PDFLaTeX is the only way I can stay sane with documents that big.