Moving to non-Word formats [long]

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2020 at 12:34, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> This is what LaTeX GUI editors do. It's a useful navigation tool (click
> to jump) but not much use beyond that.

I will take your word for it -- I never learned LaTeX. I looked at it,
but since I've never needed it and nobody's ever paid me to use it,
nope.

The functionality sounds comparable to the outline or overview or
something in Google Docs. I've tried this and it's so feeble it's
useless and I just turn it off.

> This is what Emacs sgml-fold-element does. Each folded
> element/subelement becomes a stub, like your multi-level bulleted list,
> indented according to markup depth, and you can move them around.

Others have commented to me that it's similar to org-mode. I've looked
into this a little but it contains in-text markup, which for me
invalidates the entire point of the exercise. The structure I use is
outside of the text, not part of the text; or the text is inside the
structure, but not part of the structure.

It's a bit like the difference between drawing a picture and doing a
jigsaw puzzle of the picture.

I've not tried SGML mode, but then I've never used SGML, only XML.
I've tried 2 XML editors, XMetal and Oxygen. Both are for my needs
_vastly_ overcomplicated and do not provide any comparable
functionality to an outliner.

But I've never managed to learn Emacs. I date back to the 1960s myself
and was once adept with VMS EDT, but I have never owned or used a
keyboard with a Meta key. I find Emacs' insistence on terms derived
from computers from a company that disappeared over 30 years ago
highly annoying and obstructive, and since I have a vast choice of
other, friendlier editors, I've never got past page 1 of the Emacs
tutorial, despite trying multiple times.

ErgoEmacs (and AquaMacs on macOS) both are steps in the right
direction, but not far enough.

> If you have lots of stuff to move around the place it's invaluable.
> Less useful if all you have to do is rephrase someone else's text :-(

Right. I was afraid of that.

> If you are using Word without style names, for any non-trivial or
> non-ephemeral document, you probably shouldn't be.

Agreed. But most people do not know how to use them and find they get
in the way.

> There are some specialist editors used by writers like novelists which
> have something like this, along with all kinds of database stuff to keep
> track of plots and timelines and characters.

Yes, Scrivener has a very simple outliner, but a ton of stuff I don't
need for keeping track of "scenes" and "characters" and so on which
the things I write never, ever contain. It's a dedicated tool for a
different job to my own.

> There are translation editors which do this in two panes (source lang
> and target lang) so that your translation stays synchronised.

So I've heard, but I've never done enough translation work to need
one, and my language skills aren't good enough to need them.

Ditto scriptwriting tools, but again, I don't write scripts.

> The Word styling interface, in particular the Styles Pane, is the sole
> reason I still recommend Word to publishers. LO/OO never implemented
> one, despite urging, so they have deliberately lost the entire
> publishing market, which is a pity, but probably not unexpected given
> their approach to styles.

Yes, I can see that.

The problem with Word -- one of the big ones, anyway -- is that it's
about 3 or 4 different programs for different tasks, all crammed into
one binary. There's a ton of overlap but not enough to justify this.

It's all of:
• a WYSIWYG word processor (cf. one viewing mode in later versions of
WordPerfect)
• a style/template-based editor (cf. LyX)
• a DTP tool (cf. PageMaker)
• an outliner (cf. PC Outline, Grandview)
• a powerful macro-driven text editor (cf. Emacs or Vi)

Any one of these is a fine, useful tool. However, basically all of
them conflict with each other.

However, because Word is all of them in one, it's driven all of the
others out of existence over the last 30 years or so.

WordPerfect survives, just barely, because it is so blindingly good at
being a general-purpose text entering-and-formatting tool for people
who don't really know what they're doing.

If you _do_ know, there are definitely better tools.


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