Goodbye Cruel Word 565
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?'"
One Word: Lyx (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One Word: Lyx (Score:4, Informative)
VI Improved (Score:2, Informative)
Writeroom is not actually trying to sell itself on being an improvement on anything, it sells itslef on notalgia to a time where there were zillions of text editors. Problem is, these text editors are still around. If vim is too strange, try Emacs as the poster suggested. Both have all the features listed, and are rather easy to learn if you only do simple stuff. And if you want it even simpler, pico, or nano, or jed, or joe are also available.
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.
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.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
That's fine, if you just want to write letters to your friends and family, or update a personal blog, or whatever. But if writing is something you do professionally, what is wrong with investing an afternoon or a weekend in learning how to use a truly powerful editor? My work involves a combination of technical writing, popular writing, and coding. I could do all of these using Microsoft Word, or Word in combination with Notepad for coding, with very minimal time required to get going.
But investing a week (over a period of several months) in learning to use Emacs to serve my needs has paid off dividends. When you consider that most of us spend 40+ hours a week, 48+ weeks a year, editing text of one kind or another, I think the expectation that a good tool is one that take no effort to *start* using is misguided. If you are going to be spending a large chunk of your life doing a particular task, a little short term pain to gain access to a tool that will grow with your needs over the rest of your career is really not such a burden.
Emacs is not the answer to everyone's needs, of course. But I think anyone who is at all technically savvy should at least consider learning to use a proper editor.
yp
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:1, Informative)
I'm writing my dissertation (60 pages done so far) in Word 2007. The new equation editor makes it far better at this than Word 2003 and it accepts most LaTeX syntax as well. I'm actually finding it easier than LaTeX because of this - I type my type, I type my equations, and Word takes care of most of the other drudgery for me. I don't have to deal with issues of markup, as in LaTeX. Now if only they'd add it to PowerPoint too.
(In light of this, I find it odd that I still prefer to hand-code HTML, but that's probably because each page has different elements. It's not just a mountain of text with a few images and tables thrown in).
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Claimer: the usability of interfaces to editing structured documents is my thesis topic.Re:In my experience ... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, they can't be made to run full-screen on a mac without booting into a command line (afaik).
The advantage of WriteRoom (which I've just tried out for a couple of minutes) is that it has no learning curve. Also, it's a true full-screen app - all you see is a black background and green text. No menus or windows to bother you.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:3, Informative)
click on print, in the bottom corner is a button for saving as PDF in various locations with the options to add in new ones. That way you use OSX's PDF engine instead of Open Office's.
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.
Re:But it's MAC OSX only! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...LARGE BUST (Score:3, Informative)
If she can organize her large bust to keep it out of the way when she needs to get other things done, she might be great at other organizational skills as well.
Re:wp 51 was the apex (Score:2, Informative)
Try here
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/ [columbia.edu]
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:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:4, Informative)
See here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/01/04/keyboard-shortcuts-keytips-and-comics.aspx [msdn.com]
FUCKING micro$oft games!!!... (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? I got the impression they were writers, wishing to maximize their work, like "The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk", or "you also get to drop the curtain on lifes prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen", or " you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia", or "What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else".
Now, tell me, where did running fucking micro$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?
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:3, Informative)
If for some reason the markup (which, ultimately, is a case of letting you just type) is a pain, then consider using something like Kile [sourceforge.net] or TeXlipse [sourceforge.net] which take all the pain out of writing and managing large LaTeX documents with autocomplete and a whole host of other powerful features.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:3, Informative)
One of the things I like better about TeX is how easy it is to automatically generate professional looking reports. Collecting data from systems, consolidating them, and then generating a professional looking report I can send to my clients is all automated these days, thanks to using TeX.
Re:In my experience ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In my experience ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:3, Informative)
I think this was in a previous Slashdot posting a while ago... Per the article, Saving the doc in an older format will not help, the new equation editor format is incompatable with many submission systems.
Word 2007 documents rejected by leading science journals:
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12608/1023/ [itwire.com.au]
Re:I bought Scriviner (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.html [literatureandlatte.com]
He also provides links to other OS X writing software. He must feel pretty comfortable with his competition!
I'm toying with the idea of purchasing Scrivener myself. I tried the demo and like the way you can jot down notes and images in a pretty free-form way. It's close to the way I write.
Re:Shades of Word 97 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I bought Scriviner (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:4, Informative)
If your anecdote is correct, it just shows how little regard the Microsoft powers that be have for their *existing* users.
Re:wp 51 was the apex (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The best tools stay out of the way... (Score:4, Informative)