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Goodbye Cruel Word
theodp writes "The problem with Microsoft Word, writes the NYT's Virginia Heffernan, is that 'I always feel as if I'm taking an essay test.' Seeking to break free of the tyranny of Microsoft Word, Heffernan takes a look at Scrivener and the oh-so-retro WriteRoom, which she and others feel jibe better with the way writers think. 'The new writing programs encourage a writerly restart. You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet, adjust your preference for long or short sentences, opt afresh for action over description. Renewal becomes heady: in WriteRoom's gloom is man's power to create something from nothing, to wrest form from formlessness. Let's just say it: It's biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?'"
It's the "killer ap" that got me to convert to linux full time.
http://www.lyx.org/
I've used various versions of Word (and before that, the original AppleWorks on an Apple ][e) to write books and book-length dissertations. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I still think the best version of Word for the Mac is 5.1a.
For the last decade or so my strategy was to use Word's outliner then fill in the text. Pretty straightforward when you know exactly how things are supposed to go, like for a paper or a report. Unfortunately, I found them wanting for my creative writing, where I tend to write from the inside out, starting with a scene or a character or a funny sentence but not knowing where that bit would fit in a story. Sure, I could just dump everything in the ol' slop file, or link a bunch of individual files using Word's master document, but it was always forced and clunky.
Last October I was looking for a new tool for Nanowrimo and I experimented with WriteRoom, Jer's Novel Write, Lyx, CopyWrite, Storyist, and Scriviner. In the end it came down to Storyist and Scriviner. I liked how Storyist had novel templates, but they seemed overly restrictive--and the software cost twice as much. I ended up buying Scriviner.
What I like about Scriviner is that it gracefully handles working with both long chapters and little scraps, easily allowing you to change the views to an outline or index cards on a cork board with synopses, or as individual documents, or all run in together in a single window.
Then press Alt in Office 2007 and you are shown what the shortcuts are. For commands that you do often enough that keyboard menomnics are worthwhile, the interface still works fine.
It also depends on the balance between the textual content of what you write (the words) and the form they take. In past ages, writers simply wrote -- the formatting was the job of the publisher, and the author had no control over it (unless they were a Big Name). Now that it is possible for every writer to be their own typesetter, many of them feel that it is therefore their job to spend as much if not more time formatting what they write, than actually writing it.
The first thing your publisher does when they receive your final draft is probably to rip out every scrap of your formatting and put in their own, to conform to their house style. They would actually much rather have your book in plain text, with virtually zero formatting, than have to go through the expensive and time-consuming task of removing all the unnecessary hard spaces, hard linebreaks, hard pagebreaks, etc that authors insert in the fond belief that they are "helping". Smart publishers and skilled authors in technical fields use LaTeX or XML because the writer or editor can indicate what is what without prejudicing the formatting; but there are no interfaces to either system yet that are usable by the average non-specialist writer (see my paper on this topic to the Extreme Markup conference in 2006) although a couple are beginning to get close.
Unless you are writing for self-publication (just about viable now; in which case get professional typographic advice), your best bet is a wordprocessor with a stylesheet that uses some kind of Named Styles and that saves in XML so that the publisher can pick out your text with minimal formatting, and trash all the rest of the junk that wordprocessors typically insert. For a novel, however, which typically has only minimal formatting requirements anyway, it's probably not important what you use.
In fact there are a dozen or so simple interface changes that editor makers could implement that would radically ease the burden on the writer of formal or complex documents, but this would involve a paradigm shift in the interface away from concentrating on the appearance to concentrating on actually writing. Editor makers are reluctant to do this because it would reveal just how much of their interface is actually eye-candy and how little of it is really there to help the writer; and authors are naturally reluctant to forsake the comfort of their favourite wordprocessor, especially if they perceive a new interface as restricting their ability to decorate their text (not actually the case, but a perception nevertheless).
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Claimer: the usability of interfaces to editing structured documents is my thesis topic.You are not the first to say that WriteRoom == Bad copy of VIM, probably the best example of this idea can be found here. And frankly I can see where you are coming from, but I also think that you are not really understanding WriteRoom's purpose.
The key is that WriteRoom isn't meant to be a VIM, emacs, etc replacement. It looks a little bit the same, but if you play around with it you'll soon find that WriteRoom's features have very little overlap with a traditional unix text editor. WriteRoom isn't meant to be a flexible powerful tool for editing text.
Instead, it's just meant to provide distraction free writing. "For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world." That's the one feature. To allow this these are a few of the features that WriteRoom provides that are not easily possible in a tool like VIM. I say easily because "you" may be able to get VIM to do just about anything, but for a normal user who doesn't want to write custom scripts and edit config files it's just not possible to set the same environment up in VIM that I've provided in WriteRoom.
So that's what it does. If you already are a VIM expert these features may just not be worth it. But for many users they are, and for many other users the barrier to learning a command line tool is just to high. So the choice is really between something like WriteRoom and MS Word.
Someone here linked to this which has so many good points I have no problem with reposting it.
But anyway: These people are being silly. The text editor problem has exaustivly been solved about 10 to 15 years ago. Since then we've gotten a few more, nearly all for free and one better than the next. And to all those who after 20 years of GUI computing still haven't gotten it:
YOU DON'T WRITE TEXT IN A WORD PROCESSOR!
If you're thinking "I know what I'm gonna do now - I'm gonna write a text." then DON'T use a word processor. Use an Editor of which there are countless around and available. Word processors are for formating and making documents print-ready. Repeat after me:" Word processors are *not* primary writing tools. " And don't even dare think of using a word processor for programming. There's a special place in hell for people who do that. Really.
I've been programming and writing for more than two decades now and the last time I abused a word processor as an editor for writing down my initial draft was with AmiPro on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS4. And only because I was a n00b at writing on computers, it was a print document from the get-go and AmiPro was good enough not to suck at writing and Win 3.11 lacked a good editor. I've been using jEdit for allmost a decade now and have recently picked up Emacs (not recommended for people who don't know what awaits them) because it runs on the CLI which I often have to use.
Bottom line: It's called Text Editor, or 'Editor' for short, folks. This type of programm has existed for over 30 years. Pick your favorite. And they've all got a fullscreen mode too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Huh? I got the impression they were writers, wishing to maximize their work, like "The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk", or "you also get to drop the curtain on lifes prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen", or " you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia", or "What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else".
Now, tell me, where did running fucking micro$oft games enter into all that? Perhaps you didn't read the fucking article at all, did you? You just ran at the chance of becoming just another fucking, obnoxious, micro$oft shill, right?
You're missing the point of using LaTeX. While it is true that LaTeX makes it very easy to add equations to a dissertation, the biggest problem with using Word is that you're constantly dealing with the formatting of your document rather than actually writing the content of your document. When you use LaTeX, you are pretty much giving the software complete control over layout and typesetting. You just tell LaTeX that you want an image / figure at a given location and the software decides the best location. The greatest thing about the LaTeX is how well cross-referencing works. You never have to worry about what index you assigned to a figure or an equation. You just reference it with a label and the LaTeX compiler automatically rebuilds your table of contents, list of figures and what not. Finally, most universities provide a LaTeX class file which you simply include in your LaTeX file. This will (usually) setup your dissertation with the necessary margins and formatting that is required by your faculty. If you use Word, then you will have endless headaches if you need to change your margins, because all of a sudden, your images are no longer attached to the paragraphs they belong to. If you insert an equation earlier on in your document, your reference numbers will get out of order. And if you're writing your dissertation in a sane way, then you will likely have separate files for each chapter (something totally unnecessary with LaTeX - just have separate .tex files for each chapter and include them in your main .tex file). So if you want to make formatting changes, you will have to apply those changes separately to each chapter, every single time a formatting change is required.
Anyway, before I wrote my MASc thesis, I had started doing it in Word because I had never used LaTeX and I was apprehensive about learning it. In retrospect, I am extremely happy that I ended up writing my thesis in LaTeX. Because .tex files are plain text, I committed the files to an SVN repository which allowed me access to my dissertation from any computer with an SVN client. And, once everything was setup in LaTeX, making changes to the document was easy. I never had to worry about formatting; I just focused on the content and didn't worry about how it looked. At the end of the day, it looked great and formatting required zero effort on my part because including the faculty class file was a simple process.