My perfect writing environment
I’ve been on a quest for the perfect academic writing environment for some time. On a good day, the current bloated, wheezing incarnation of Word makes me grind my teeth, and on a bad one bystanders are well advised to remove all sharp objects from my vicinity. I’m always on the lookout, so when I saw Ulysses (also discussed on MacSlash), I had to download it and give it a go. It seems to get a lot right (though it’s at an early stage of development), but it’s not perfect for me, which could just be because I’m very demanding. Ulysses is slanted towards creative writers, but many of the features would also work well for academic writing. They make the point that novels are rarely written in one go, starting at the beginning, but I know of very few scientists who write papers in that way either.
So here are the elements of my perfect writing environment. Many editors/word processors have some of these, but none have all. Note that I’m talking about writing text not code, and formats which are editable (obviously, if no-one else needs to edit the file, a PDF file can be generated from any application in MacOSX).
- Concentrate on the writing. First and foremost, a good writing environment should not get in your way. Formatting has nothing to do with the substance of what you write, andâas I know to my costâprovides dangerous displacement activity to do in place of actual work. BBEdit is suitably lean and mean, but it is really slanted towards writing code. This brings me on to the next point…
- Export formats. It seems to me that all you need to mark up while writing is (as with clean XHTML) the structure of the document (headings, subheadings, emphasised text etc.). All academic journals want text visually formatted in a different way. With structural markup, this should be a reasonably easy job. You can use styles in this way in Word, but I’ve never found it particularly easy. The ideal would be if journals could supply something like an XML stylesheet, which would then visually style your document exactly the way you want it. What you then also need is the ability to export in a number of formats. I like using LaTeX, but few biological journals will accept .tex files: most accept only Word .doc format, or sometimes RTF. Ulysses has a plugin to convert to RTF, and LaTeX converters are in the pipeline.
- Flexibility and extensibility. I like to be able to make my writing environment comfy and exactly the way I like it. BBEdit is strong on this, as is Nisus Writer, allowing rich Applescripts, shell and Perl scripting to make your life easier.
- References. Academic writers need to cite sources frequently, so some easy and reasonably transparent way to do this is important. I’m glad to see that the new version of Endnote restores the old ability to scan any RTF document for citations, and to format them in the document.
- Commenting/reviewing. I do very little academic writing on my own. Most papers pass through several people’s hands before they see the light of day, so a clear way to see what others have changed, and the comments they have made, is vital. Hydra-like collaborative features would be ideal. Oh, and these collaborators use a mixture of Macs and PCs.
- Open or human-readable file format. I’ve sweated over my work: I don’t want to lose it forever if the company making the application goes belly up.
- Organize related files. I quite like the way Ulysses deals with this: all of the documents related to a particular project are kept inside the MacOSX package, so that it appears as a single file to the system (but you can still dive in and grab a plain text document yourself). This also means that you could keep all the different versions of the final document together, without having to think of unique names for them, or use the ‘kiss of death’ title, ‘Final version’.
I don’t want much do I? If there are any developers out there keen to build the world’s greatest academic writing environment, I’d be very happy to be an ultra-demanding beta tester. Otherwise, I’ll just have to see if I can cobble together some kind of work flow with BBEdit, Applescripts and Perl scripts, with Word making an appearance at the last possible moment.
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Your post hits quite a spot with me, as I feel the exact same way. I, too, was excited when I first saw Ulysses -- then became increasingly disappointed as they got so much of it wrong. I've been looking for the perfect writing tool for some time now, and have come tantalizingly close. I guess I'm also too picky and demanding.
While I like the notes feature that Ulysses has, I found that notes can't be tied to specific places within a document. That makes the feature a bit useless to me, as I'm often jotting down little notes inline with a paragraph, because those notes are specific to what I'm writing about.
With my technical writing, the ability to export into multiple formats is an absolute necessity. I need editable formats to enable me to work cooperatively with a team (usually Word, but RTF can do in a pinch). I need non-editable, presentation-level formats (PDF, PS) to give to management or print out. I need (X)HTML for the web archives. I need LaTeX and plain text for the hardcore tech and UNIX geeks.
And I don't want to have to keep five copies of the doc just for different display/distro purposes. I've done it. It leads to much frustration and gnashing of teeth. Besides, it makes me start to call my boss bad things out loud, which isn't good for my career.
This might be a bit premature, but with my disappointment in Ulysses I'm finally starting to do something on my own to give me the perfect writing environment (which tends to follow your list exactly, with a few additional features.) I'd love to have others to work with, or at least bounce ideas around with, to help make it better.
I've got several ideas, based around an XML backend using XSLT -- only doing it all with a nice GUI that doesn't get in the way when I'm writing. Let me know if you're interested in getting involved!----- Nathan, I would love to get involved with your project! It sounds like it might be the answer to all my problems (well, not all of them, perhaps--I don't suppose it will fix my fridge or stop the neighbours from having noisy parties late at night)!
You're probably on your own with the actual coding (I'm learning Perl at the moment, and have smatterings of other languages, but I'm no expert), but I would enthusiastically help out with testing, ideas and so on. Drop me a line: butshesagirl@rousette.org.uk
This is actually a perfect example of one of the totally unexpected bonuses of having this blog; tremendously cool people read it, make funny or insightful comments and sometimes even solve my problems for me. I'm pretty lucky
by bsag @ 03/07/2003 7:07 am • Permalink •
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hey, i read your blog -- ergo, i'm tremendously cool. cheers! :D
by dvd @ 03/07/2003 2:07 pm • Permalink •
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Just to clarify:
I meant "I'm feel lucky that people--who happen to be tremendously cool--read this", not "people read this and are therefore tremendously cool".
Lest anyone should think I'm getting delusions of grandeur.
(Note to self: don't use the word 'lest' if you want people to think you don't have delusions of grandeur).
by bsag @ 03/07/2003 10:07 pm • Permalink •
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dvd: Indeed you are.
by bsag @ 03/07/2003 10:08 pm • Permalink •
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mumble Most people would think you'd just mis-typed "lets". Grin
by Lyle @ 04/07/2003 9:08 am • Permalink •
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I feel so kick-ass -- I'm now officially tremendously cool!
by Nathan Ladd @ 05/07/2003 5:07 pm • Permalink •
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It does sound dreadfully complicated the way you all describe it. I thought it was just a case of typing the letters, sequentially, until words and then sentences were formed. Great novels have been written like that, so they tell me.
by Peter @ 10/07/2003 9:07 pm • Permalink •
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Peter: Aye, but there's the rub. Any kind of writing activity is subject to almost anything sucking the attention and motivation away. The displacement activity could take almost any form, but since I'm a techie kind of person, the various quirks, bugs and annoyances of the software start to irk me so much that I can't write, and spend my time looking around for something better.
And you know what they say about bad workmen/women and their tools...
by bsag @ 11/07/2003 4:08 pm • Permalink •
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