PageEdit alternative?

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by ghmerrill

I downloaded the Bluegriffon editor and tried it for a few minutes, but I found the interface to be mostly bewildering and it made by eyeballs hurt.

Any program that ISN'T initially bewildering is probably too shallow to be much use.

[ghmerrill]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

Any program that ISN'T initially bewildering is probably too shallow to be much use.

If I heard something like that during an interview of a design/development candidate, I think it would be the last thing I'd be hearing from him.

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by ghmerrill

If I heard something like that during an interview of a design/development candidate, I think it would be the last thing I'd be hearing from him.

Yes, marketing has to lie like a politician with cries of 'Easy!' But we all know really that anything that doesn't require a bit of investigation and learning isn't going to do much. And that the much-bandied word 'Intuitive' merely means 'Similar to the program I'm accustomed to already'.

Icons are what get me. Who decided that the (not terribly intuitive) function 'Filter' was 'intuitively' conveyed by something that looks like the top end of an enema apparatus? (In real life, you 'filter' to take something out. In computing you 'filter' to take everything ELSE out.)

Very often the best signifier for something that has a name is the name itself. Something that has escaped GUI designers since Microsoft imposed their 'Ribbon' on the computing world and menus became infra dig. Fortunately the programmers mostly retained pop-up labelling as well.

But I digress.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ghmerrill

Yeah, I do totally get that; and I'm not suggesting you should do otherwise.

My wife is now encouraging me to just move to the new version of Word for the authoring part to finish the 3 chapters of the book that are left. But I'm reluctant to do that based on ... what? ... about 35 years experience with Word in its various incarnations.

But you've given me some reasonable alternative ways to go.

I used to think that Word was horrible...right up the point where I bothered to learn how to use it. As a former Wordperfect user, Word was dreadful, terrible, blab-blab-blab. Then one day, I was working on a document that was going to be 300 pages of internal cross-references, etc.

I bit the bullet and took a few hours of time, learned Styles and Headings and the Outline functions--and never looked back.

In over 6,000 books that I've now quoted, at my shop, I can count on ONE HAND--one hand!--the number of files I've seen where people even used heading styles, much less paragraph styles. It's sad, to me, that people have been so iPhone-ized that they think that EVERYTHING has to be magic, has to be intuitive, or they can't be bothered. All these authors caused themselves many more hours of work, just because they can't be bothered to learn the tool.

I see this comment all the time, how "horrible' Word is. Yeah, if you use it like a typewriter with word-wrap, the underlying stuff will indeed be horrible. Still loads better than anything out of Pages or god-help-us, iAutjhor, but if you use Styles, the output from Word can be put almost DIRECTLY into Sigil and left as-is. And would be almost indistiguishable from typing directly IN Sigil.

FWIW.

Hitch

[exaltedwombat]

And clever stuff like footnotes transfers straight from Word via Calibre.

(I wish I could have said 'via EPUB Tools' but I've never got good results on large or complex files. I often give them a go, though.)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

And clever stuff like footnotes transfers straight from Word via Calibre.

(I wish I could have said 'via EPUB Tools' but I've never got good results on large or complex files. I often give them a go, though.)

Yes, excellent point. As much as my heart will always belong to WordPerfect (and I still have it, mind you), Word does a yeoman's job and a lot of heavy lifting. It's that pesky "you should bother to learn to use it" thing that seems to upset most folks.

ePUBTools is brilliant, though, for tagging font styling and preserving it on a "nuclear option" cleanup job. ;-) And broken paras...lots of stuff like that.

Hitch

[Notjohn]

Hitch, your defense of Word and WordPerfect betray your life as an editor. They aren't good tools for an author, however, because writing isn't linear. See Rob Sawyer's explication at https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm for why he and I and other writers never understood why people opted for WordPerfect over WordStar in the 1980s/1990s.

Word can be kludged, of course, with a WordStar command set written by Mike Petrie, who also maintains a WS website. That's how I use Word, though I have little interest in styles. It's so easy to clean up Word's awful html! Why waste time adapting yesterday's styles to today's book?

Just FWIW. I realize this doesn't apply to your line of work, and perhaps not that of anyone else here. In college I learned to compose on a typewriter, but I always had a yellow lined pad at hand when things got tough. The day I discovered "computer" composition (an Olympia electronic typewriter with a computer extension with a 5.25 inch disk drive) was a joyous one, March 1985. I sold that piece for $250 and never looked back. At last I could massage a story or essay until it just FELT GOOD, and only then print it out -- and mail it, of course! It was several years before editors would accept a computer disk (or many disks, in the case of a book).

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Hitch, your defense of Word and WordPerfect betray your life as an editor. They aren't good tools for an author, however, because writing isn't linear. See Rob Sawyer's explication at https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm for why he and I and other writers never understood why people opted for WordPerfect over WordStar in the 1980s/1990s.

Word can be kludged, of course, with a WordStar command set written by Mike Petrie, who also maintains a WS website. That's how I use Word, though I have little interest in styles. It's so easy to clean up Word's awful html! Why waste time adapting yesterday's styles to today's book?

Just FWIW. I realize this doesn't apply to your line of work, and perhaps not that of anyone else here. In college I learned to compose on a typewriter, but I always had a yellow lined pad at hand when things got tough. The day I discovered "computer" composition (an Olympia electronic typewriter with a computer extension with a 5.25 inch disk drive) was a joyous one, March 1985. I sold that piece for $250 and never looked back. At last I could massage a story or essay until it just FELT GOOD, and only then print it out -- and mail it, of course! It was several years before editors would accept a computer disk (or many disks, in the case of a book).

Y'know, NJ...

As you know, as you're the one who told me, and I have some of your books, I know who you are, and that buys you a fair amount of "pass" from me. However, while you might be remotely correct, in that my "creative" writing is not mighty, I've composed quite literally millions of words, in everything from manuals to letters to legal documents, you name it, since the advent of the earliest computer. (In fact, in the last 125 weeks, I have composed, written and typed 8,530,509 [Eight Million, Five Hundred Thirty Thousand, Five Hundred Nine) words of business correspondence. Over 68K words/week. I'll put that up against even Rex Stout's formidable output.) Hell, I introduced computing to my RE Development firm by the expedient of building a then 8086 box with my spouse and dragging the damned thing into my office, and "forcing" the firm into the digital age in '86, I think it was. Ah, the miracle of spreadsheets. (When building millions of square feet of projects and needing to track or calculate ROI, trust me, spreadsheets WERE a miracle...)

But the idea that I preferred WP, because I was an "editor" is just flatly wrong. Anyone with a left-brain preference would love WP over its competitors, for one simple reason--reveal codes. Once you understood the simple expedient of wrapping text in elements and styles...how elegant. How simple and how formidable.

Sure, writing may not be "linear," but that has sweet FA to do with preferring WS to WP to Word to Bob's Big Word Processor. It's frankly a bit idiotic to think that someone prefers WP due to "linear" processes. There's nothing more "linear" about WP than WS than Word. You wanna write, write.

I would argue, in fact, that Word allows writers to be far freeer in non-linear writing than almost any other tool, because it allows them to be as damned dumb about the software as they wish. Write away, don't use headers or styles--but if you do, you can at least use the Document Pane to keep remote track of where you are, allowing you to drip your words of wisdom anywhere you want in the document. Unlike Scrivener, you're not stuck making wee "cards" for the "corkboard" or any of that drivel. Hell, you can be as non-linear in Word as is humanly possible on a computer, although, yes, it hardly compares with scribbling drivel on a yellow-lined pad and then screwing those pages up into corkscrews and throwing them about.

I'm sorry, but just because WS has keyboard commands doesn't make it superior. I've used it. Used WP, used pretty much EVERY word-processor, from time immemorial, dating back to the original Selectric II to the IBM OS/6. People like you like it because you DO NOT understand styles or their power, and the keyboard commands make certain things eaiser, once you've learned them. But WS is the least mentally demanding, of pretty much ALL word-processors, and once you have the muscle memory--well, magic electronic typewriter and you don't have to know anything else.

That's fine, I don't expect you to change--but the truth is, you missed it. You never understood what styles could and would do for you, so, honestly--you're not really qualified to judge Word or any other modern word-processor. I mean, as I said, to you, it's a magic typewriter. It's your work and you're the one stuck cleaning it up, so knock yourself out. Personally, I prefer to make my life infinitely easier by understanding--and using--the tools available to me.

Hitch

[DiapDealer]

If you have editors, typesetters, and ebook makers (or simply don't care that the markup in your ebooks is hideously bloated and/or unintelligable), then you can write however you want. Somebody else will deal with the mess that is your ebook.

But if you write AND create your own ebooks (or have any regard whatsoever for the people who do it for you), refusing to learn how to do it more efficiently and/or cleanly with the latest tools at your disposal is lazy at best, and inconsiderate or incompetent at worst.

Not sure why so many writers believe their craft should be the only one exempt from change/evolution/improvement. I suspect it's mostly dogma masquerading as art. "I can't write a sentence unless it's with Word Star on my Commodore 64 while wearing my favorite slippers."

[najgori]

my 2c: use markdown for markup. leave styles to designers.

[DiapDealer]

Roughly translated: kick the can further down the road for someone else to fix.

[najgori]

not at all. just, writers should not design.

[exaltedwombat]

I think some of us are getting confused and agitated over just what 'styles' in Word are.

It saves fuss later to put Headers, Sub-headers, Body text etc. in appropriate styles. To indent and centre using commands rather than by tapping the space bar. And, for a novel, destined to be an eBook, that's very likely about it.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by najgori

not at all. just, writers should not design.

Then use a typewriter or write on paper and stop using tools made for writing AND designing.

I find the notion that writers need to distance themselves from designing to be old-fashioned and time-wasting.

If that's the way it's "supposed to be" then writers should also get absolutely no say in the final design. You either care how it ultimately looks, or you don't. And if you DO care, then take a proactive role in making it happen the way you want.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

I think some of us are getting confused and agitated over just what 'styles' in Word are.

I'm certainly not confused. In my mind, the 'styles' you're referring to should be just as much a part of today's writer's toolkit as a comma, or a period, or a spell-checker are.