Zoot Grows on You

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 23, 2007 at 10:23 AM

A word of support for plain text from me as well. DISCLAIMER: I realise the subjectivity of all this.

I have been working with plain text for years with editors like notepad and with Brainstorm since I discovered it. I have found nothing else as capable as a writing environment, though I admit that I haven’‘t tried WhizFolders yet.

Some months ago I started an on-line MBA and thought I was going to need more than plain text for my assignments. I tried programs like IdeaMason and specialised bibliographic software. However, in practice, I find that I am still writing everything from within Brainstorm. It took me a while to learn Harvard referencing, but now I feel relatively comfortable with it, which I think is better than relying on software to do it. I only format stuff at the very end, through the University’s Virtual Learning Environment that I am obliged to use anyway.

I do not write equations anymore but academics who write a lot of them seem to say that there’s no alternative to Tech which, by the way, is edited as plain text.

Tables are the only thing miss in plain text. However, I have found that most RTF capable programs handle tables poorly. In any case, there’s nothing compared to spreadsheets for working with complex tables, so that’s where I end up editing them.

alx