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Man in Search of a Method
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Posted by tightbeam
Apr 7, 2009 at 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?
Posted by JohnK
Apr 8, 2009 at 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.
Posted by tightbeam
Apr 9, 2009 at 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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 10, 2009 at 05:17 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/
Posted by JohnK
Apr 11, 2009 at 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.