Recently in writing Category

Bugger. It's already November 3rd and I've completely forgotten about NaNoWriMo. It's been a few years since I tried it (and failed) and I was intending to have another got this year. It's too late though. I could probabyl catch up over the weekend, but this is going to be a busy month and there's no way I'd have the time. Maybe next year...

I do want to do some more writing though. I feel it's far too long since I wrote anything substantial. Maybe I'll try to start something whilst I'm on the cruise.

I've been meaning to mention this for a couple of weeks, but I keep forgetting. A friend of mind wrote a novel which is in the form of a teenager's diary and we thought that the perfect way to publish it was as a fictional blog.

So the result is Alternative Freak. I'm pretty sure that none of my regular readers are really in the target audience. But if you know any teenagers, then perhaps you could point them at the site. I'd love to hear what they think.

Following on from Monday's post, I thought it might be interesting to go into a bit more detail about why I won't ever use Microsoft Word (or, indeed, any word processor) unless I have to. I have three reasons - one is personal experience, one is technical and the third is largely philosophical.

Firstly, the personal experience. I consider (or, more accurately, considered) myself a Word power-user. Many years ago I used to write Word macros to automate document creation. I know what I'm doing with Word. So when I wrote my first book, six or so years ago, Word was my first choice as the tool to use. I was using Word 97 and some formatting templates that had been supplied by my publishers. I remember that I had read some stories about problems that people had experienced writing a whole book in one Word document so I followed what seemed to be considered best practice and created a separate document for each chapter. Now this is all some time ago so my memory is a bit hazy, but I distinctly remember often having to spend time reapplying formatting that got scrambled when I opened a chapter. Now that could have been the version of Word, a problem with the templates, or some other technical glitch. All I know is that it left a bad taste in my mouth and over the months that I spent writing the book I went from being a Word fan to hating it with a passion.

My second reason is more technical. Any word processor will store your document in a proprietary binary file format. If you were to open a Word document in a text editor like Notepad then you wouldn't be able make much sense of what you see. That's because all of the formatting information is stored in a manner that only a word processing program can understand. One the other hand, Unix (and therefore Linux) has a long tradition of dealing with plain text files[1]. The Unix tool set has a large number of interoperable tools which can be used to manipulate text files in various ways. For example, it's simple to use "find" and "grep" to recursively search a directory and all subdirectories to find all of the files that contain a particular phrase. Another good example is getting a word count for a set of documents. With Word you would need to open each file individually, get the word count and add the numbers manually to get a total. With Unix tools, it's a simple process to get the word count for each individual file and the total across all the files. It's probably just what I'm used to, but I find it far easier to deal with plain text files.

My final reason is, as I said above, more philosophical. I don't think that WYSIWYG tools are a good way to produce documents. Think about it. How often do you spend almost as much time fiddling with the formatting of a Word document as you do actually writing? A WYSIWYG program encourages you to see the presentation of your document as intrinsically linked to the content. We used to see web publishing the same way - the presentation of a web page (lots of <font> tags and too many nested tables) were completely intertwined with the actual content making it hard to change one without changing the other. Now, of course, we laugh at the old days as we all produce semantically meaningful markup which will be formatted using an external stylesheet. And it should be the same with documents. Write what you have to write, only pausing to add extra information to define the various parts of the document (this is the title, this is a subsection header, this is a bullet list, and so on). Once you've created the document that way, you can start to think about how it should look and apply styles appropriately. I realise that Word can be used that way (the default document styles allow you to define the various parts of your document) but I don't think that a WYSIWYG program encourages you to think about your writing that way - the presentation always gets in the way.

I'm not saying anything new or radical here. People have been producing documents this way for years (ask your neighbourhood Unix geek about LaTeX). It's just a shame that the most popular end-user tools for document creation don't encourage this mode of working.

So that's why I prefer to work in a plain text format (or something that is, at least, stored as text like POD or DocBook) and why I'll never use a word processor unless it's something that a client insists on for some reason.

[1] And yes, I realise that text is (strictly speaking) another binary format. The point is that it is a simple and well-understood format. Of course Unicode encodings complicate that somewhat.

There's an interesting discussion over on David Heinemeier Hansson's blog about how the technical publishing industry could change in order to give better deal to technical authors. It's particularly notable for the contributions from Tim O'Reilly and Gary Cornell (the publisher at Apress).

One point that interested me was DHH's assertion that all books are written in Word. I wrote my first book in Word, but I don't remember that being forced on me by the publishers. It was a disaster and probably added more than a couple of weeks to the whole process. I vowed never to do that again.

So when I wrote my second book, I was glad that neither of my co-authors ever suggested Word. It was decided from a very early point that we'd be using POD (actually O'Reilly's slightly extended version of POD). All three of us felt much more comfortable working in a text-based format. In fact the whole process made for an interesting article.

I can't believe that technical authors are happy writing in Word. The advantages using a format that can be processed using the standard Unix toolset must be obvious to anyone with a vaguely technical background. I can only assume that some publishers insist on Word.

That said, I'm not completely wedded to the idea of using POD. Next time (and I'm certainly not guaranteeing there will be a next time) I'm thinking of using DocBook. The idea of using a standard XML format that can be transformed into many other formats is very appealing. I might even try OpenOffice Writer in DocBook mode.

But I will never again write anything longer than a memo using Word.

I finished the article that I mentioned last week and it's now online. It's an introduction to RSS and, in particular, how end users can read RSS feeds.

All comments are appreciated.

They say that if you want to be a writer then the important thing is to keep writing. And I'm certainly not going to disagree with them.

But I've been a bad writer recently and other than the witterings on this site I haven't written anything for some considerable time. My last published works were two articles on perl.com almost a year ago. I seem to have spent most of the last year writing code rather than words.

So last night I decided to force myself to write something substantial. I spent a couple of hours working on a new article. And it all seemed to go very well. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to write. I got almost a thousand words written in that time. The article isn't finished, but I hope to complete it by the end of the weekend, at which point I'll put it on the web somewhere and post a link to it.

The best thing is that I've got ideas for a couple more articles too. So it looks like I'll be spending quite a lot of the next couple of weeks writing. By the end of the month I'll be complaining that I don't spend enough time coding :)