Plain text plus

[mmcirvin]

Brad DeLong's lament about Word leads to a bunch of people piling on modern computer interfaces and longing for simpler days.

I say what I've said before (particularly in the comments to that post): it seems to me that the ideal document-writing interface is not plain text and not WYSIWYG, but something in between that is character-based but lets you insert simple markup like bold, italics, superscripts, etc. and see some visual representation of that if you want. Something, in short, like an early 1980s word processor, or a modern blogging client's editor.

What I don't know is whether this strikes me as obviously superior because it is logically superior, or because I was introduced to writing on a computer in the age of Wordstar.

Comments

[kodi]

WYSIWYG does make me happy when I'm preparing a document to be viewed only in Word. I use Word to take notes, and (although there is much that I hate about Word) being able to edit and view my notes at the same time is handy.

But then, when I want to print the notes, I wish Word weren't WYSIWIG, because I want to print them at 8 point in two columns, and trying to navigate a two-column document using the keyboard in Word is (as far as I've discovered) impossible.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

SpeedScript! FrEdWriter!

For Windows and Mac!

I see a great need.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It would be an interesting exercise to see if you could do anything interesting with modern GUI techniques applied to such a program.

In a sense they do already exist; there are any number of notepad-type applications that do something like this, but they're usually optimized for jotting quick notes rather than heavy-duty document writing. I'd actually want it to be a fairly full-featured word processor in some senses, with rich footnote/endnote support, maybe inline figures, table-of-contents generation, etc. Just don't force me to type into a representation of the formatted page so I have to see the margins and page breaks and pull tricks just to avoid looking at a proportional font while I type (I want to be able to see how many spaces I put in). The print preview could be a separate thing.

[alienne.livejournal.com]

One of the few things that annoys me about Windows is that it's fairly difficult to get a real Markdown (http://www.daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) parsing system set up. I really LOVE just writing in plain text/Markdown, then converting, and wish it were easier to do for me for non-web writing.

Something generalized from Markdown would be phenomenal as a stand-alone editor, i think -- have a "code view" and a "display view" as if it were HTML, but marked up as rich text instead.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I like Markdown too; I used it with BBEdit when writing my GIMP tutorial (http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/gimp_tutorial/). It goes a long way toward addressing the shortcomings of a pure character stream. I suppose MediaWiki wikitext is similar.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Actually, I suppose it would be a great service to humanity to come up with some universal standard for Markdown-ish plaintext markup.

It's possible that MediaWiki has already beaten everyone else to the punch because of the popularity of Wikipedia. I'm now more familiar with the details of MediaWiki than with Markdown, though Markdown has the great advantage of being much closer to the informal quasi-markup I use when writing plain-text documents for human eyes.

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

I often really miss WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" command in Word. But that's usually because Word has decided to do some kind of irritating autoformatting that I can't figure out how to turn off. I'm not enough of a geek-power-user to want to hand-code all my own formatting, but I'm enough of one to want to see what the program thinks it should do for me and how it's doing it.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Wordperfect 5.1 with reveal codes open in a split screen. I used it to begin with for when I'd done something and couldn't figure out what I'd done, or where the bold mark was. But I ended up pretty much keeping it open for mark up, not that I knew what that was then.

I guess what I miss is the two open at once, you can preview in the wiki stuff, but not see what the marking is doing while you edit.

And that's WP for DOS, not windows, in the ideal world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much swore by DOS WordPerfect's Reveal Codes for a while there. But I think I liked Wordstar even more.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I've noticed that some blog comment boards now do some sort of fancy auto-preview that updates while you type; I don't know if it's entirely client-side JavaScript or some sort of AJAX thing. It's very nice, in any event.

XJournal's HTML Preview window auto-updates while the HTML codes remain visible in the actual edit window. But HTML, while OK for many purposes, isn't ideal as a human-readable code display; something more succinct like wikitext or Markdown would be better. (NOT phpBB's weird markup, which is about as verbose as HTML but harder to use because of the editor's "helpful" interventions.)