Writing using minimalistic software

[nikkie]

I like this idea. I've been advocating it among my more tech-saavy friends for a long time.

The terrible markup created by Word can cause a lot of problems when converting documents to different formats. Word is not a "source" editor, so you don't really have full control of the actual markup, and lots of weird things can happen to your document that you won't even notice until you try to convert it to a real format that can be used in an eReader, and you suddenly notice that half of your book is composed of a broken list or some such.

Writers who don't use the built-in dropdown menus for setting headers and whatnot in Word end up causing a lot of trouble for themselves unless they pay for someone to fix all that stuff for them later. Other writers use the "nuclear method" *shudder* which destroys all existing formatting, and then restore the lost formatting manually as a final stage. I've been to conferences where people actually recommend doing this before submitting their book to self-publishing sites like Smashwords (where I work) and the KDP program.

To me this seems like a waste of time. I understand that many writers tweak with style as a method of procrastination while writing, and that is why they can't switch software easily. I've suggested that this hypothetical "simple" editor have a copy of solitaire built-in, but it didn't go over very well.

I personally write my books in markdown (very similar to plain text) using desktop software that looks like dillinger.io and convert to all the formats with pandoc, the tool that the OP mentioned. Asciidoc is also a good alternative. Markdown gives me the ability to add simple necessary markup like chapter headers, bold, italics, and quotes without dealing with the strict validation and distracting nature of (x)html. It is more than enough for people writing fiction novels. If you are writing programming textbooks you will probably want to go straight to html instead for more control over your markup, unless you have a good converter for code snippets and are happy with what it generates.

Edit:
Rather than using word tracker for keeping track of changes, I check all my books into git. You can see an example here. If I ever work with an editor, they can fork my repo and submit pull requests with changes. Probably out of reach for most people, but I dream of a future that a piece of software can be written to hide all the details so that your average author can use git for their book's change tracking too.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by nikkie

I like this idea. I've been advocating it among my more tech-saavy friends for a long time.

The terrible markup created by Word can cause a lot of problems when converting documents to different formats. Word is not a "source" editor, so you don't really have full control of the actual markup, and lots of weird things can happen to your document that you won't even notice until you try to convert it to a real format that can be used in an eReader, and you suddenly notice that half of your book is composed of a broken list or some such.

Nikkie:

I have to say, that this is only the case when someone does NOT use Styles; when someone uses ad hoc typing. Anyone who can use Markdown to write a manuscript can, in about 20 minutes, learn to use Word well enough to export what is basically a squeaky-clean, ready-for-a-matching stylesheet HTML file. It's not hard. And it requires absolutely no use of "the built-in dropdown menus" that you refer to in the next paragraph. It's less demanding than using Markdown.

I've said this repeatedly here and I'll say it again: the whole hoohah about Word creating garbage is, well, garbage. Yes, if John Doe gets a hold of Word, and just types willy-nilly, he'll output crap as HTML. But I guarantee you I can take a completely crappy file, and without using the dreaded SW "nuke" method, clean it up so that it outputs perfectly clean HTML in short order. It doesn't require any more discipline than taking a 30-minute-long tutorial. If a writer is too lazy to do that, then...well, what else can we expect as output? it will take them that long to learn and then remember to use Markdown, certainly.

Writers who don't use the built-in dropdown menus for setting headers and whatnot in Word end up causing a lot of trouble for themselves unless they pay for someone to fix all that stuff for them later. Other writers use the "nuclear method" *shudder* which destroys all existing formatting, and then restore the lost formatting manually as a final stage. I've been to conferences where people actually recommend doing this before submitting their book to self-publishing sites like Smashwords (where I work) and the KDP program.

The nuclear method is, with no offense to Coker, an abomination. There's no reason for it. Anyone with a competent understanding of Word can clean up a botched manuscript pretty quickly. Use two macros to preserve bold and italic formatting, set styles up, clear the rest of the styles, then lay down a base style, re-italicize the italics and re-bold the bold, and bob's yer uncle. The Smashwords "nuclear method" is for people with no patience nor aptitude for learning, as I'm sure you'd agree.

To me this seems like a waste of time. I understand that many writers tweak with style as a method of procrastination while writing, and that is why they can't switch software easily. I've suggested that this hypothetical "simple" editor have a copy of solitaire built-in, but it didn't go over very well.

I have exceedingly few writers who "tweak with style" as a method of procrastination. I've been successful in training some of them to use styles, not as some idiotic "make this look pretty" function, but to show them how incredibly useful, from a structural and creative standpoint, all that pesky stuff in the 'dropdown' menus really IS. The styles in the dropdown menus aren't merely text-formatting tools; they're CSS. They're structural, as well as formatting.

They enable users to use power features like Outline (incredibly valuable for long, complex documents with many levels); the Document map feature, and, as I've already stated, for creating a manuscript in which you can instantly change all the formatting for a given style with one click. You can display all the chapter heads at once, to see if you've misnumbered along the way; you can drag and drop sections or chapters around instantly...none of the silliness of trying to copy and paste inside the actual document. And it's absolutely irreplaceable for master documents and their sub-documents.

I personally write my books in markdown (very similar to plain text) using desktop software that looks like dillinger.io and convert to all the formats with pandoc, the tool that the OP mentioned. Asciidoc is also a good alternative. Markdown gives me the ability to add simple necessary markup like chapter headers, bold, italics, and quotes without dealing with the strict validation and distracting nature of (x)html. It is more than enough for people writing fiction novels. If you are writing programming textbooks you will probably want to go straight to html instead for more control over your markup, unless you have a good converter for code snippets and are happy with what it generates.

As I said: this is what works for you, and that's great. I personally get tired of having to use three (3!) different forms of Markdown every day; the Markdown in my CSR (Desk), the Markdown in Teamworks (my PM system), and the Markdown in Google+. Oh, yeah, and the Markdown in KDP Forums. So 4 different versions of it, every single day. Each one is different. That's annoying as hell. But to learn to do nothing but create bold, italics, headers, and quotes efficiently and competently in Word wouldn't take the averagely intelligent person more than half-an-hour, and it's far more forgiving when you want to make changes in many places at once. Just sayin'.

Edit:
Rather than using word tracker for keeping track of changes, I check all my books into git. You can see an example here. If I ever work with an editor, they can fork my repo and submit pull requests with changes. Probably out of reach for most people, but I dream of a future that a piece of software can be written to hide all the details so that your average author can use git for their book's change tracking too.

And, of course, lastly: for Track Changes, Markdown and Word simply cannot compare. For folks sending ms's out to editors or beta readers, Markdown really isn't going to work. Again, it suits you, and that's great...but it won't suit the average novelist or writer, not really. Not unless they have absolutely zero other people with input into their process.

Just my $.02. Obviously, you're happy with Markdown, and I know some other folks who are. But most writers are really not going to change their spots; they don't want to have to type all those extra keystrokes to bold a word, or italicize a sentence (I know it annoys me to have to switch back and forth between asterisks, underscores, etc., for italicization, not to mention the other formatting options). Not when they can double-click and either CTRL-letter or click an icon. As I stated, YMMV. ;-)

Hitch

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I have exceedingly few writers who "tweak with style" as a method of procrastination. I've been successful in training some of them to use styles, not as some idiotic "make this look pretty" function, but to show them how incredibly useful, from a structural and creative standpoint, all that pesky stuff in the 'dropdown' menus really IS. The styles in the dropdown menus aren't merely text-formatting tools; they're CSS. They're structural, as well as formatting.

Yep, this is pretty much what I was saying on another thread here (but about OpenOffice/LibreOffice rather than Word). The neat thing about learning to use styles is that one they're there you can forget about whether the appearance is perfect until it's time to prepare for publishing. No more thinking "I have to get this right now because it will be a pain to come back and change it later". No. Just set a style and know that you can quickly and easily play with it as much as you need/want when the actual writing is done.

[nikkie]

@Hitch

It sounds like you've done a great job of training authors to use Word correctly. Bravo! I agree entirely that much of the trouble with Word output originates behind the keyboard; e.g., garbage in, garbage out. I also agree that it is entirely possible to write documents that generate reasonable markup in Word (and have proper TOC-generation information). This is less true the more complex your document, but for fiction, I definitely believe that 30 minutes of hands-on training can solve 90% of the issues users see.

Many of the authors we see who have the most trouble with their books are first-timers or very non-technical people. I believe that the interface of Word encourages them to use itself wrongly. It encourages users to do one-off styling instead of using the semantic tags like headers and whatnot that can generate useful metadata and be styled at a later time. It seems to me that Word's interface was originally designed for creating print documents and has not significantly changed since we've moved to a much more digital world. While it is possible to use Word in a way that doesn't cause problems when converted, I don't think most computer users do it that way by default.

I am intrigued by your suggestion that books can be easily fixed by macros. I personally no longer write in Word so I can't really suggest any good ones. I don't think most writers are competent enough to create such a macro. But I do have some interest in getting writers to use document cleaning macros provided by others if it helps. Have you shared any of yours or would you be willing to do so?

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by pendragginp

Wow. Harsh.

Maybe people who can't use a racing car shouldn't be allowed to drive their Ford to the store.

No, the other way around.

There are many people that don't know how to use a computer, just as there are many people who don't know how to drive a race car. Both create a lot of problems.

The computer is the race car of computing devices, and as such, one would do best to study how it's used before trying to do it. If you don't, you'll crash and burn and get nothing done.

Originally Posted by nikkie

Rather than using word tracker for keeping track of changes, I check all my books into git.

Hehe. I did that with my thesis in LaTeX, but used Mercurial. (It was just new, and wanted to see if it was indeed better than SVN.)

Maybe I should look into Pandoc. I don't know if something like Markdown can do include files or something like it. It'd be needed. I'll not write an entire book into one file.

[kennyc]

Hee-Hee, I used MS Visual SourceSafe for a bit (long long ago) to manage poetry revisions.



Now I _sometimes_ keep previous printed-out versions, or keep both or several versions in the same file.

[cortman]

@Katsunami- Sounds like an interesting project. I could very easily be tempted to try/use it.
I have to agree with you that someone who uses Word styles and produces terrifically formatted documents with it, and yet has no clue how to make a folder and drop a file in it sounds like an unlikely scenario.
Sounds like trolling to me, to be honest.
Go for it! I'm thinking about starting a project of my own shortly- a Python/QT chess PGN viewer and editor. Something simple and functional that would work with Linux.

[gmw]

I use a local subversion server and TortoiseSVN for all my writing. With OpenOffice/LibreOffice installed the "diff" feature automatically calls up a comparison between versions. It's not quite so neat as comparing simple text files, but good enough for my purposes and I like having the log of commits (for no great reason other than curiosity). On top of all that, it makes a convenient backup facility.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by gmw

I use a local subversion server and TortoiseSVN for all my writing. With OpenOffice/LibreOffice installed the "diff" feature automatically calls up a comparison between versions. It's not quite so neat as comparing simple text files, but good enough for my purposes and I like having the log of commits (for no great reason other than curiosity). On top of all that, it makes a convenient backup facility.

and you don't find that 'extra work' something of a pain in the butt?

I know I did after a while and finally decided that those old revisions or originals were relatively worthless, particularly after a piece was published.

[nikkie]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Maybe I should look into Pandoc. I don't know if something like Markdown can do include files or something like it. It'd be needed. I'll not write an entire book into one file.

Markdown knows nothing about multiple files, but Pandoc totally does, and I use Pandoc to turn the markdown into an ePub. I have each chapter as a separate file in a folder called "Chapters". Here's my Makefile.

[Katsunami]

In that case, Pandoc, combined with Markdown, seems to be already capable of doing what I propose, although the structure needs to be put into the make-file instead of in normal folders. It's more flexible, but also somewhat harder to use.

I didn't know that Pandoc can use a make-file, but then again, I haven't researched it very extensively.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by cortman

@Katsunami- Sounds like an interesting project. I could very easily be tempted to try/use it.
I have to agree with you that someone who uses Word styles and produces terrifically formatted documents with it, and yet has no clue how to make a folder and drop a file in it sounds like an unlikely scenario.
Sounds like trolling to me, to be honest.

If you think I was trolling, you have grossly misunderstood what I wrote. You're conflating two completely different discussions, on different topics--one, the techiness of clients, and the other, whether or not Word itself creates viable HTML and CSS.

At NO time did I ever say that my clients generally "use[s] Word styles and produce[s] terrifically formatted documents with it," in fact, I said the opposite. What I said to Nikki was about those very few clients who wanted to save money on their clean-up, or who actually wanted to learn. I can count those users on one hand, versus the more-than-2,000 clients we already have.

I spend the vast majority of my day doing everything from explaining where my clients can find their own downloads folders, to how to save from a browser, to what a "directory" IS, etc. So, you want to call my opnion trolling, fine.

Until you spend two hours on the phone with a client, as I did last Friday, because she kept insisting that her MOBI file was "opening up in ADE," and refused--REFUSED--to upload it to the KDP, because she had, somehow, screwed up her file associations, and thought that she could push the magic button that would "send" her file (replete with ADE, mind you) to the KDP to be put on sale, then really, I don't see where you get to decide that I'M TROLLING.

I have at least a hundred examples like that. At LEAST.

I already wished Katsunami the best. I think for geeksters, it will be absolutely fine. I think for authors, it will be about as popular as markdown is. if you folks haven't already learned by now that humans, 99.99% of the time, will do whatever's easiest, not what's BEST, and manage to rationalize the former over the latter, then there's nothing further I can say in this thread.

Hitch

[nikkie]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

In that case, Pandoc, combined with Markdown, seems to be already capable of doing what I propose, although the structure needs to be put into the make-file instead of in normal folders. It's more flexible, but also somewhat harder to use.

I didn't know that Pandoc can use a make-file, but then again, I haven't researched it very extensively.

Well makefiles are technology-unspecific. It tries to make target by running the commands specified in the makefile for that target, so you can use it with any command line runnable programs.

It's completely unusable by people who don't use the command-line of course. A UI with a button would obviously be better.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Hitch

if you folks haven't already learned by now that humans, 99.99% of the time, will do whatever's easiest, not what's BEST, and manage to rationalize the former over the latter, then there's nothing further I can say in this thread.

Hitch

...and an equally as often, geeks will think they know what is best, even when they don't.

It's rarely a matter of taking easy over best. It's a matter of understanding that in many cases, easy is part of what makes something best, and other factors pass a clear point of diminishing returns.

I learned to code in the days before GUIs and IDEs, but I embraced both. They make me more productive, and allow me to better meet the business needs of my employers, and in the type of apps I write, any less-than-optimized code they generate is totally irrelevant.

For text document creation, in my book (hehe...book pun), WYSIWYG is King. Easy IS best!

[gmw]

Originally Posted by kennyc

and you don't find that 'extra work' something of a pain in the butt?

I know I did after a while and finally decided that those old revisions or originals were relatively worthless, particularly after a piece was published.

I already have subversion and TortoiseSVN installed for my day job, so there isn't really any extra work for me. In fact, this way I find it easier to keep regular backups/snapshots of the state of a project, which is reassuring.

It is very very rare that I compare revisions in my writing, I mentioned it only as a comparison/cross-reference to the supposed advantages of using plain text with a version management system.

I quite agree that the old revisions are relatively worthless after a certain point, I can clean them up if/when I want, and probably will eventually, but for now subversion keeps them neatly tucked away so they aren't really any trouble; a bit of disk space used, but that's all.