Slashdot Log In
Goodbye Cruel Word
Posted by
Zonk
on Sunday January 06, @03:07PM
from the it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night dept.
from the it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night dept.
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?'"
Related Stories
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to think that the reality of the situation was that you really could not have a professional class word processing application that does all things that professional writers need used by the same audience that merely wants to write school reports or letters to friends. However, it is all in the interface and Pages [apple.com] from Apple has shown that many of the "professional" features in word processing have to do with page layout or formatting issues as well as integrating not just text and fonts, but also images. Fundamentally the issue with interfaces is not providing features piled on features, but figuring out how to craft a tool that people can use to get work done rather than having to learn how to use the tool. I want my word processing environment to simply let me craft written word and images into a form that allows me to communicate my intent to the audience without getting in the way or making me learn arcane and occult methods for getting my page numbers to appear just right or getting the text to wrap around an embedded image without constantly having to reformat an entire 80 (or more) page document. Writing my doctoral dissertation in Word back in 2003 was a repeated lesson in pain as every time I changed a single image, the formatting of the entire document would be altered with entire paragraphs seeming to disappear or get hidden outside of margins and I never want to return to that world.
Granted, I still have to return to Word from time to time as Pages is not yet perfect, still needing better integration with Endnote, but it is getting pretty close. The perfect environment would be Pages that can read and edit Adobe Acrobat files along with markup, comments and notes along with full Endnote functionality that would also run on a tablet that takes advantage of gestures...
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Interesting)
Office 2007 is leaps and bounds over anything Microsoft put out before. The interface is also heavily improved, so I don't know where you're getting this (unless this is pre-2005 when Office 2007 wasn't public knowledge)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Interesting)
That is very much a matter of taste. I found the Office 2007 user interface an unusable, intrusive abomination, that was constantly in my way when I was trying to work [1], so after a few months I went back to 2003. I agree that it was "leaps and bounds over anything Microsoft put out before", but in the bad direction. Your mileage may vary, of course.
[1] It did look good, though, I'll give it that. Perfect for the exec who chooses his PA on bust size rather than on organisational skills.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Informative)
Shades of Word 97 (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember hearing about this issue with the trial version of Word 97 converting all files it was allowed to touch to Word 97 format. Some things never change....
This is an area where I think Sun is far more on the ball than Microsoft - for one, SO/OOo defaults to saving in the same format as the original document. More importantly, the file formats are better documented than the ones for Word, so you should be able to read them for the forseeable future. The downside of SO/OOo is that it is too much of a clone of MS-Office and dealing with all the formatting issues does get in the way of writing.
I've been thinking of getting a Mac specifically to be able to use Pages.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [epu.ucc.ie] 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).
--
Claimer: the usability of interfaces to editing structured documents is my thesis topic.Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, we had "word processors," and we had "desktop publishing software," the difference being that the desktop publishing software let you precisely control page layout and were WYSIWYG. Word processors were things you typed documents into and they broke that document into pages to send to a printer. Word processors had extensive features to help you enter your document correctly, like spell and grammar checkers, ways to emphasize text by making it bold or underlined, and not much else. They processed words, not pages.
Then someone had the not-so-bright idea to bring WYSIWYG into word processing, combining Desktop Publishing Software and Word Processing Software into shitty abominations called WordPerfect > 5.1 and Microsoft Word. Putting a small subset of desktop publishing power into cheap, buggy software ensured that secretaries everywhere would abuse Comic Sans and clip art until the end of time, and attach their creations to what should have been plain text email.
My first "office suite" let you type your document into the word processor, then you could set up the page layout in the desktop publishing program and link the text in, where it would flow into the predetermined layout and fill it. Two discrete steps, which couldn't have been easier. Trying to do this all at once is a pain in the ass, especially if you're changing the document around (editing). The problems worsen when multiple people work on the same document.
Initially, it was obvious that word processing and desktop publishing were two very different things, and never the twain shall meet. We'd all be a lot better off if this distinction had stayed, because the problem with word processors today is not that they're trying to be all things to all people, but that they're trying to do two different things at the same time.
One Word: Lyx (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
Re:One Word: Lyx (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, what's the deal with them not using freely-available cross-platform tools [lyx.org] to make it easy to build on your platform of choice if you don't use it on one of those?
What's more, just about none [fedoraproject.org] of the more popular [ubuntu.com] Linux distributions [debian.org] have packages available for free download and install using your system's package manager.
another good one is (Score:5, Interesting)
from the looks of the front page you would think math geeks would only use it but it also functions as an excellent word processor...
Tools vs Content (Score:5, Interesting)
What's more likely is that if you think you're doing better and that helps you, so much the better.
Document composers for mass mailings, labels, newsletters, all need different features that aren't part of the word processing function of creativity, rather its creative exposition. I'll write (a dozen books, thousands of articles so far) on whatever, and won't go to Jerry Pournelle's years of bitching about the nuances. It's the content, Jerry. It's the content. Word, Word Perfect, WordStar, Zedit, Joe, Vi, textedit, don't much matter. Grammar checkers, spell checkers, syntactical analyzers, pretty printers, code-indenting hoohaa, I don't care. Let me write. Grace and elegance are for those that need glitter and swan-like moves. They look pretty, but it's only style, and style will always be subjective. Content rules; fancy-assed WYSIWYG twelve-key-combo-crap drools.
Just my 2c worth.
Clever reference by Heffernan (Score:5, Insightful)
This was a coffee-out-the-nose moment for me - it's a parody of the very first paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
Mark Pilgrim said it best a year ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Since 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
A writing tool for writers (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something to be said for a writing tool for writers.
First, professional writers need only minimal formatting capability. Formatting is someone else's job. Any formatting done by the author will just interfere with page makeup later. Writers need to be able to insert chapter breaks, and that's about it.
Second, the word processor should not interrupt the flow of writing. Auto-completion is usually not wanted. Spell checking is probably better done after the fact, not during writing.
Third, not losing the text is important. The writer should not have to "save". A word processor which guaranteed it would never lose the text, backed up by continuous remote backup to multiple sites and an insurance policy, would probably have a following among pros.
There are newsroom systems like this, on which reporters compose stories.
The way it works isn't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
What is so pathetic is that I have ordinary technical documents from the late 50's and 60's that are laid out better, have better graphics, and are still perfectly readable today. While at the same time, a Word document I saved last week either can't be opened, or has all the symbols corrupted.
Brett
I bought Scriviner (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nanowrimo.com] 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.
Sorry, but this is silly rubbish (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:OpenOffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from that, I switched to OO when I was grant writing, it managed a project better then MS Office and the integration with the Spreadsheet was better then Excel and Word. Go figure.
Re:wp 51 was the apex (Score:5, Interesting)
WP was proof that you did not have to invent an abstract and incomprehensible model of a document simply to make a tool to author one.
Re:wp 51 was the apex (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never quite understood the bloatware bitching. If there are a lot of features you don't like, then shut up, sit down and don't use them for Chrissake. You can write your novel very happily in AbiWord I'm sure but don't complain because I want something that can do more. I used WP to do double-sided tri-folds. I don't know what I would have done without reveal codes for micromanaging stuff that as often as not was in text and graphics boxes rotated this way or that. Get a publishing package you say. Why? WordPerfect produced the B&W laserprinted trifolds we needed. Used macros to take a delimited server db addresses dump, convert it to a WP data file and do the merge and print. Routinely ran a whole bunch of lists that way for years with WP as the core program.
When Microsoft used their OS monopoly money to dump Office 97 on the market it was one of the most shameful examples of a monopoly murdering quality with artificial underpricing.
vi for writing (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, a lightweight markup language, like Markdown [wikipedia.org], lets you write normally - but be able to convert your document to XHTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc etc.
The biggest downside to using vim is that, unlike Scrivener, it doesn't give you explicit places to put your notes / outline / etc. So, using vim, you're free to put your notes / etc wherever you want
For drafting, I often using an SCM like git or subversion, but for little snippets and free-writes, etc? They might be written down on paper, they might be in a random note file
It might be worth it to use screen [gnu.org] or vim split screens to reproduce something like Scrivener provides, with designated places on the sides to have notes, etc etc. I think I might try that out
But, come-on, really
I use vim for my writing, because it's what I use all day anyway.
I use git for keeping track of my files / drafts / revisions, because it's what I use all day anyway.
I use markdown for my markup, because it's what I use all day anyway.
Re:In my experience ... (Score:5, Informative)
You are not the first to say that WriteRoom == Bad copy of VIM, probably the best example of this idea can be found here [diveintomark.org]. 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.