Writers at Work

Muirium · 07 Aug 2014, 20:12

Oh I'm sure you were totally into Macs right up until October 2011, 7bit…

Yosemite's a nice step in the right direction, after a lot of bumbling around in the Lion days courtesy of Steve's latter aesthetic and his point man on software taste: Scott Forstall. I've heard good things about Forstall being an internal advocate of what turned out to be vital components of Apple's resurgence (Carbon, Webkit, iPhone) but his love of "photorealistic" looks in software design rubbed a lot of us up the wrong way. Avie Tevanian and Scott Forstall took the Mac into weird, clumsy, and increasingly dated looking places during their reigns over OS X. I'm not alone in being delighted that Sir Ive has taken over. Our knight in shining, sleek, and artfully designed armour! I know Mr A500 hates what he's doing, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear I'm the only guy here at DT who loves Yosemite to bits, but outside of our little world I'm getting a great response.

@Webwit: credit where it's due to Microsoft. Metro was a nice piece of work from them. Just because the poor bastards' customers are tasteless nincompoops who want their XP back doesn't mean they weren't on to something! Times change. I hope Microsoft can find a way to get in front of it and keep making money as they do. The future's looking pretty bleak for them as they struggle to purge out Ballmer's legacy.

7bit · 07 Aug 2014, 20:13

Use one of the 2 existing text editors to write the tex file.
Run latex on it.
Use xdvi to view how it should look like.
Make a PostScript file out of it to print (view with gv).
Use lp or lpr to print file.
You can also use pdflatex to make a PDF.

edit: I was never ever into Macs at all!

All I use is GNUstep Windowmaker which is a clone of the NeXTstep windowmanager, which had been created by a team led by Steve Jobs around 1990.

Muirium · 07 Aug 2014, 20:17

I always enjoy these peeks into the alternate universe where everyone is a commandline jockey. World peace would be guaranteed. Although perhaps not reproduction…

Halvar · 07 Aug 2014, 20:24

7bit wrote: ↑Use one of the 2 existing text editors to write the tex file.
Run latex on it.
Use xdvi to view how it should look like.
Make a PostScript file out of it to print (view with gv).
Use lp or lpr to print file.
You can also use pdflatex to make a PDF.

edit: I was never ever into Macs at all!

That's exactly what I did ... from 1992 to 1996.

From 1997 on I had "Scientific Workplace", a pseudo-WYSIWYG tex editor that helped a lot in writing the tex file faster.

Things got ugly later.

7bit · 07 Aug 2014, 20:42

One argument against WYSIWYG is that you can't write a script to drive a GUI.

All my keyboard layout files or key caps graphics are done in LaTeX. I've got a relatively simple input file and out comes a png graphic.
Try this with word!

@Demongolator: please move all this flamewar to Off-topic. Title: Text processing.

Muirium · 07 Aug 2014, 20:44

Hear hear! I love Markdown as much as I love a pointless but thought provoking firefight. Real authors would throw their typewriters at the lot of us in this thread…

@Halvar: You made some good points in that post you wrote while I turned the page.

I think that alternate word processors like Pages and Libreoffice (actually, are there any more than that now?) are as much of a dead end as they look. People aren't desktop publishing like they used to. A lot of work goes straight to the web, of course, and I bet that browser text fields like this one I'm typing into just now are the real Word killer. DTP / WP got disrupted when the printer wasn't the first and foremost output we were thinking about.

As for a good format, though, you're quite right about that. And normal people needing to memorise markup / Markdown. But these issues are confined to those of us who do need to produce content beyond a Tumblr and the like. I don't think we are as dominant a force as we once were, before most people even had a use for a computer.

SL89 · 07 Aug 2014, 22:17

I am surprised nobody has brought up George R.R. Martin, his ancient DOS machine or his use of WordStar yet!

Halvar · 07 Aug 2014, 23:12

@Muirium: I think the type of job where you have to write a lot isn't dying but prospering. But you're right, less is written to print -- the step to the paperless office that was the big promise of the 80s has become reality only in the last years when it became natural for pretty much all business processes to be built in software. Which also means less letters and memos are written and more (virtual) forms are filled...

@SL89: You're right. What does the abundance of violent fantasies he developed in his books tell us about his life?

7bit · 07 Aug 2014, 23:27

In reality, he is fighting his wordprocessing software?

xwhatsit · 07 Aug 2014, 23:35

Halvar wrote: ↑For professional writers and journalists that have a well-designed publishing process or for mathematicians or physicists who have to learn TeX anyway that might be viable, but for everyday writing that is part of every knowledge worker job?

I know this is purely anecdotal, but my wife (who is an academic in the field of public health—i.e. very social-sciencey, and doesn't require fancy math formula typesetting etc.)—uses LaTeX very happily and can't stand the WYSIWIG approach for anything more complicated than a single level of hierarchy or more than three citations. Granted, she is married to a software developer, but I was amazed to see how easily she picked it up with no programming background. Apparently it's way easier than Word + Endnote.

It should be pointed out that the whole point of LaTeX (less so TeX) is that you just write, and don't give a fig to formatting etc. That's not your problem—it's the program's problem. The commands aren't particularly difficult to remember either; I don't see what the mental and memory overhead of remembering “chapter” creates a chapter and ”section” creates a section. Certainly easier than trying to find where on the toolbar or ribbon amongst the millions of other hieroglyphics and strange icons you click to change into “section mode”, especially for somebody who works with words every day (and I don't just mean programmers, I'm talking about people like my wife who is, after all, a “word-worker” as well).

Graphics and pictograms work for some, but at least the small subset of people I understand and work with, telling a computer to do something for you (with words) instead of actually doing the work yourself by shuffling around a mouse in a fairytale emulation of a “desktop” is much more natural and just more damned straightforward. Learning curve be damned.

Muirium · 08 Aug 2014, 00:47

My particular oddity is an addiction to keyboard shortcuts. (This goes back beyond my awareness of differing qualities of keyboards, themselves.) I don't particularly like typing markup. But I love hitting a combo and having that stuff automated, with the cursor left just where I want it. In fact, I've the weird kind of brain that's fine with multiple clipboards (and using them to populate the markup snippets) yet which finds code itself essentially impossible.

I like a good GUI, too, but the less I fiddle with it the better. It's basically a way to present parallel data that's less cumbersome for a lot of us than a wall of Terminal prose. Writing, however, I still prefer to be 100% on my keyboard.

Findecanor · 08 Aug 2014, 17:04

Muirium wrote: ↑Hear hear! I love Markdown as much as I love a pointless but thought provoking firefight.

Kids these days... I wrote a translator from markdown to HTML before it was called "markdown".

Muirium · 08 Aug 2014, 17:50

I got into it fairly late, I'll admit. The name is perfect, but Markdown's big problem is the fracture it's undergoing because its author can't be arsed keeping up with other people's developments of his baby. Gruber wrote it for himself, fair enough. But much of the web is mad for it these days — every blogging platform worth its salt, and every new text editor — so it needs a guiding hand.

Multimarkdown is a nice direction. It can handle writing papers and novels just as well as Latex, while looking more pleasant to my, and many's, eyes. But it hasn't Markdown's crucial strength of implicit ubiquity. It dismays me that even something so purposefully, even brutally, simple as Markdown can wind up heading towards a format war.

7bit · 08 Aug 2014, 18:01

Markdown is bad, because the number of spaces has a meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Example

2 spaces are a linebreak.

Muirium · 08 Aug 2014, 18:05

Yes, that one sucks. I script around it, because I write a lot of dialogue and need those line breaks where they are.

But it's a nice bare bones system overall. I can read it without banging my head, and I can script it without banging my keyboard either. It's already got traction, and that seals the deal for me.

JBert · 08 Aug 2014, 21:28

Muirium wrote: ↑@Webwit: credit where it's due to Microsoft. Metro was a nice piece of work from them. Just because the poor bastards' customers are tasteless nincompoops who want their XP back doesn't mean they weren't on to something! Times change. I hope Microsoft can find a way to get in front of it and keep making money as they do. The future's looking pretty bleak for them as they struggle to purge out Ballmer's legacy.

Not sure if serious or trolling...
I still suffer trying to make my Linux install adhere to some of the tricks hidden in Windows 7. Metro means squat for a desktop install.

On a more serious note, I tend to write in another plain-text format: AsciiDoc. The reference implementation just has a few more tricks built-in than Markdown, although dialects have also sprung up.

Muirium · 09 Aug 2014, 01:18

A bit of both. Metro's a flawed UI for a desktop, as you say, but it's a refreshing change in style from Microsoft. 7, Vista, and earlier are all hideous, from my perspective. But Metro wasn't only a breath of fresh air in the Windows realm, it was ahead of Apple for once in setting a new fashion in interfaces. My complaint isn't functionality (as I don't use it) but that it's too "flat". Minimalism with a focus on sharp fonts doesn't have to be quite as monolithic as that. iOS 7 and Yosemite both have more layering to them, translucencies and shadows work well in a clear design, in place of their predecessors' over textured madness. Microsoft did good. It's a shame to see them have to keep dialing back on it.

SL89 · 09 Aug 2014, 04:07

Muirium wrote: ↑A bit of both. Metro's a flawed UI for a desktop, as you say, but it's a refreshing change in style from Microsoft. 7, Vista, and earlier are all hideous, from my perspective. But Metro wasn't only a breath of fresh air in the Windows realm, it was ahead of Apple for once in setting a new fashion in interfaces. My complaint isn't functionality (as I don't use it) but that it's too "flat". Minimalism with a focus on sharp fonts doesn't have to be quite as monolithic as that. iOS 7 and Yosemite both have more layering to them, translucencies and shadows work well in a clear design, in place of their predecessors' over textured madness. Microsoft did good. It's a shame to see them have to keep dialing back on it.

Metro is AWESOME... On devices with touch and have a display 10" or less. Above that it looks and acts like 'Babys First 'Puter." But seriously the Surface tablets and WinPhone UI are really really well put together. Its just a crap UI for desktops and lots of laptops.

I think its very interesting how Apple has gone from fake velvet and brushed everything to an almost ethereal sense of grace, OSX is slowly becoming more 'churchlike' in that sense as opposed to the 90's Futureworld it was since OSX launched.

Muirium · 09 Aug 2014, 15:42

I always considered OS X, even Lion, a long way better than Vista/7, or indeed the backwards compatible desktop mode in Windows 8. But Metro was an unexpected leap forward from Microsoft. If only they could figure out how to get people running their tablets and phones. The one Windows strategy damaged not only them but the whole PC OEM industry. Just when it's under its biggest ever attack.

Now for something almost kinda back on topic:

Not writers, per se, but Secretarial Scientists! Something tells me Mr_A500 would like the site I got this photo from.

webwit · 09 Aug 2014, 15:56

Both cunts of companies and criminals, e.g. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... 2T20140808 or Microsoft getting found out by Snowden as a strategic partner of the NSA.
Windows 7 made OS X look outdated though. The rest is an illusion by fanboys of a corporation. In the meantime the whole argument seems to resolve around different ways how to launch an application (that is, your web browser). Ffs.

Muirium · 09 Aug 2014, 16:02

Take a breather and stretch your wings before you get back to your Selectric! It's the weekend…

mr_a500 · 09 Aug 2014, 17:04

Muirium wrote: ↑Not writers, per se, but Secretarial Scientists! Something tells me Mr_A500 would like the site I got this photo from.

Oh indeed I do. ("dinosaur's den" - hey wait... are you implying that I am a dinosaur?)

Muirium · 09 Aug 2014, 18:10

As I recall, dinos don't really get computers. Our input devices are too fiddly for them. They need something they can get their teeth into.

Sterling photo you've got there. I presume that's the goal of your collection!

mr_a500 · 09 Aug 2014, 18:27

You can't really blame the T-Rex for not liking computers - with those useless dangling forearms.

vivalarevolución · 18 Aug 2014, 15:42

Vonnegut did a lot of work with a Smith-Corona Corsair or Cougar. Not sure what is featured in that photo, but is definitely not a small Smith-Corona.