Lately I’ve been taking steps to get off word processors like Word and Write and get back to a basic text editor. Modern writing programs are just not capable of saving my words as simple strings anymore. They wrap my words in proprietary or even open code that clutters up my documents and makes it damn near impossible to save them as basic HTML. Why do I want my stories in HTML? Because that’s where Self Publishing and I believe, all publishing is heading.
The days of proprietary formats like .doc and .pdf are finally gone. Replaced by the new code of the web, HTML 5. E-book formats are also in flux, but the most popular ones are HTML based. Formats like epub require your text to be wrapped in basic <p> tags of common HTML. As anyone who as ever tried to save their story at a web page in Word knows, if you actually look at the HTML Microsoft provides, it’s riddled with stylesheet garbage that only makes sense to Word. The same goes for Open Office’s Write program. When I can save documents to clean, HTML 5 in those programs, I may return to them.
In the mean time, I’m using Gedit, the plain text editor that comes with Gnome, my desktop of choice on Ubuntu, Linux. There are other similar editors available for your favorite operating system. What I like about Gedit, is that fact that it is extendable and so has some rudimentary spell checking. But the end result of what I write in Gedit, is a clean, simple text file. I can then transform the text into <p> wrapped paragraphs or lines quite easily with simple Python or Perl scripts. I know, I’m quite nerdy like that. But because I can do these simple scripts, I am free to ditch all the madness of formatting my writing into basic HTML.
Also, as anyone who follows Cory Doctorow knows, if you write in basic text strings, you can do wonderful things with your work that can not be done to proprietary document formats. Like check it into repositories as a way to back up what you write, or transform your text into HTML, or query it for any number of things with simple code snippets. As any programmer will tell you, manipulating strings of text is one of the most powerful things you can do with code. It’s also the most basic way to communicate with your computer, but that’s another lesson for a much more technical crowd.
That’s a good point Steve. Oh, and how the heck are you? ;-)
I’ve also found that if you import a simple txt file to Google Docs and then save it as an HTML page, it gives you back basic HTML code. Although instead of tags, it uses tags to indicate line returns.
I’ve been writing my first several drafts in TextEdit for almost three years now. I’ve noticed a big difference between when I have to use Word and when I don’t. For some reason the words just flow easier without Word’s balky interface.