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Man in Search of a Method
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Posted by tightbeam
Apr 6, 2009 at 10:35 PM
I’ve obsessively been seeking a simple, efficient method for the simple, efficient construction of technical ‘how-to’ books.
My ‘suite du jour’ consists of TkOutline, Stick, AceText, Q10, and EditPad. I use these five tools to plan, research, and draft each book, then import the final manuscript into Word or InDesign for styling and prepress. I stay with plain text to the bitter end. I’ve tried MyInfo, The Guide, MyBase, etc., etc., but I found myself wasting time trying to make the draft ‘look’ good instead of doing any actual work.
Do others here favor plain text when writing or am I being prehistoric?
More important, can anyone suggest other plain text information organizers like AceText? I love AceText, but it doesn’t let me export entire collections as text or html. I jury-rigged a way to do it with XML, but I’d love to find something as good as AceText with a decent export feature.
Thanks!
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 7, 2009 at 01:54 AM
I too find plain text a liberating environment in which to write. I often turn to NoteTab when I need a clean space where I can write with little distraction.
Some other plain text tools to consider would include Brainstorm and Zoot… although (hopefully) Zoot.
Steve Z.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 7, 2009 at 02:14 AM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Some
>other plain text tools to consider would include Brainstorm and Zoot… although
>(hopefully) Zoot.
That should read, (hopefully) Zoot will be adding text formatting soon.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 7, 2009 at 08:06 AM
I also favour plain text for writing more than anything (except, on accasions, pen and paper). I will only write in Word if there’s nothing else available and, even then, I will only use formatted headings to simulate structure and as placeholders, i.e. “such content goes here”.
Brainstorm (http://www.brainstormsw.com) is my program of choice and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to work with complex structures. The only thing I have found comparable in power are personal wikis but I am personally not attracted to the wiki concept. Brainstorm includes an MS Word macro that makes it easy to export your work to Word in a structured manner (unfortunately it has trouble in non-English versions of Windows/Office). Note that Brainstorm Software is now under new ownership and it may be a while before development resumes, but the program is very mature (it actualy has more than twenty years of history behind it, starting out in DOS).
Another program that I find very powerful (also with DOS roots) but am still learning is MaxThink (http://www.maxthink.org). It has been fairly discussed at this forum so you should be able to find others’ impressions of it; I recall that our lawyer members seemed to appreciate it :-) I do suggest that you download and try it, and also view the various tutorial videos available, as it has some fairly complex capabilities in (re)arranging text. It has a very good Word import/export feature, the best I’ve seen in such a program.
Posted by JohnK
Apr 7, 2009 at 09:48 PM
When I recently tried out a variety of plain-text tools for drafting long documents, I settled on The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/) mainly because of its flexible export features. Ignore the program name and the way it’s marketed—even if you never use the journal component (I don’t use it), The Journal is a well-featured writing environment.