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Man in Search of a Method

Started by tightbeam on 4/6/2009
tightbeam 4/6/2009 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!





Stephen Zeoli 4/7/2009 1:54 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.
Stephen Zeoli 4/7/2009 2:14 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.
Alexander Deliyannis 4/7/2009 8:06 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 (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 (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.

JohnK 4/7/2009 9:48 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.
tightbeam 4/7/2009 11:27 pm
JohnK wrote:
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/

It looks nice, but it's not strictly plain text. I see formatting options (bold, italic, etc.) in the toolbar. How would you say The Journal improves over MyInfo, The Guide, TreePad, and others of that ilk?

JohnK 4/8/2009 10:01 pm
True, The Journal is not plain text. It does RTF, but I'm not hard-core enough to hold that against any program (although I've never used the formatting options). I'm happy as long as I can easily export my material, and The Journal's export options are good.

MyInfo, Treepad etc are essentially information gathering and research tools, and are designed as such. The Journal is primarily a writing tool. It's leaner. I prefer it.

If you insist on plain text, perhaps look at NoteTab Pro (http://www.notetab.com/ in outline mode, which came a close second for me. It's robust and flexible. If you take the time to master Notetab's scripting language, you can make the program do pretty much anything you want, e.g. I used scripts to remove blank lines, add two spaces after each period etc. before export.
tightbeam 4/9/2009 10:16 pm
John,

True, The Journal is not plain text. It does RTF, but I'm not hard-core enough to hold
that against any program (although I've never used the formatting options).

My fetish for plain text is pretty strong (hard-core? sure!) right up until I'm done writing and ready to start styling, usually in Word. If I try to write in a full-featured environment stacked with formatting options, table options, etc., I can't resist a little bold here, a little headline font there, and soon an hour is lost without anything else getting done. You seem to have better self-control!

Here's what I do now:

For each non-trivial project, I create a new AceText collection and fill it over time with my notes, snippets, and other research. Then, in EditPad Pro, I open my AceText collection in the left pane and quickly build my first draft by dragging clips from there into my document, then fold the text chapter-by-chapter.

I've been on the look-out for a single program to replace AceText and EditPad Pro. I did look at Supernotecard and ndxCards, both of which were designed to do what I'm now doing with two programs not really designed to do that (whew!), but neither does the job quite so simply and so efficiently.

Any similar programs out there I may have missed?

Bob

Alexander Deliyannis 4/10/2009 5:17 am
bobmclain wrote:
For each non-trivial project, I create a new AceText collection and
fill it over time with my notes, snippets, and other research. Then, in EditPad Pro, I
open my AceText collection in the left pane and quickly build my first draft by
dragging clips from there into my document, then fold the text
chapter-by-chapter.

That is exactly the way I work in Brainstorm. In fact' it's got a 'magic paste' feature to monitor whatever you copy to the clipboard, which means that you can concentrate on collecting, confident that all your clips will be there when you start writing. It can handle infinite hierarchies which means that you can organise your collection and then your writings in as simple or as complex a structure as you like. And, it has automatic identification of 'namesakes' ('clones') i.e. identical entries, which I find extremely useful.

There are surely others, probably remnants of a plain-text era such as Maxthink. One program that has been mentioned here in the not-so-recent past is InSight: http://www.dataomega.com/insight/index.htm I now see that the program has some formatting features; I do not think that these divert from the core plain-ext functionality, but your opinion may vary. It's been a while since I tried it out.

Here's an older interesting discussion on the subject of plain text; I'm sure there have been others:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/127

Sideline: I am becoming increasingly interested in the markup languages that one can use from within plain text, such as LaTex. A powerful tool I am investigating is AsciiDoc: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

JohnK 4/11/2009 12:53 pm
I did a bit more mindless Googling on plain text information dumps and came across CintaNotes (http://cintanotes.com/ New to me, and haven't seen it mentioned here before. Looks like an Evernote wannabee, and is quite basic, but that may be its strength. Still in beta. Supports tags and find-as-you-type. The roadmap (http://cintanotes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=119 suggests it might be worth keeping an eye on. It looks like there will be a RTF version, but that will be commercial.
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