Word processors

[chipotle]

I've discovered that my new room lets in a lot more light, particularly morning light, than my old room. This means it'll be a lot easier to wake up in the morning--whether I want to or not, of course. I got about five and a half hours of sleep last night. That means, though, I'm up early enough to keep pondering something I've been pondering for a while: word processors.

Earlier this week, most of the Mac news sites carried blurbs for "Ulysses," one of several word processors on the Mac that claim to be aimed at creative writers. All of them follow variants on the same philosophy, from what I can tell. They let you save multiple documents in one file, switching between them with a tabbed view (like sheets in Excel); some save separate notes with the file. None of them even attempt to be WYSIWYG. All of them have limited formatting capability. Really limited. So limited, in fact, that they can't produce a manuscript in a proper format. (I'm not sure any of them let you define your own headers, none of them can grok the idea that you might want a header from page 2 on rather than all or nothing, and some of them won't let you apply any formatting to your text at all, including underlining.)

Which of course leads me to wonder: are any of the guys doing these things actually writers--even unpublished hacks like me--or are they just making products that work the way they think writers write? On second thought, given that the screenshots for Ulysses have spelling errors in them, the question's clearly rhetorical.

What I'd like to see in a word processor is a hodge-podge of Nota Bene and WordStar features, along with a few new ones. Instead of tabbed documents, just let me save and open documents as a group. Give me quick keys for navigating through the document by more than just word and page. (NB had sentence, clause and paragraph motion keys, and allowed you to set invisible markers you could jump between.) Let me select with any of the motion keys, too (another NB-ism; instead of holding down [SHIFT] to select, [F2] toggled selection on and off). Let me do quick searches, ideally multiple document, that bring up results in a separate window. I could do spell-checking that way, too. Support revision marks. If I have two windows open, let me scroll the one I'm not in from the keyboard. (It might be my notes or a previous draft.)

And separating presentation from content is a great thing for focusing on writing--but for God's sake, let me do formatting when I need to. Switch between a draft view--single-spaced to fit more text on screen, an arbitrary font chosen for screen readability, but don't abandon all pretense of display formatting--and a true WYSIWYG one. Ideally, for WYSIWYG, I'd like to be able to drop in different "style sheets" that completely change the look of the document, so it's a couple clicks to go from proper manuscript format to a self-published chapbook, or to exporting InDesign markup. (Microsoft Word tries this with AutoFormat, but fails.)

So: Seriously. What would you like to see in a word processor?

Comments

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

A martini dispenser. I know Hemingway would have wanted one, too. You can't argue with that kind of a recommendation.

My needs for word processing software are very simple, really. Word wrap, find/replace... that's about it. Notepad is unsatisfactory but Wordpad is more than adequate. ...why are you looking at me like that?

[revar.livejournal.com]

I've always found word processors sadly lacking in the tools to properly format code. Stuff like simple one or two keystroke block indents and commenting out of code. Syntax highlighting, etc etc... :)

Actually I've not used a word processor in years. I just keep using text editors, which are targeted at a vastly different audience.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Tragic as it may sound, I use just Wordpad to write for the most part, and if I want to format text prettily, then I dig up Word, because I have that for free. (came with a system software package a while back)

What I'd like to see in addition to that would be the ability to create a sidebar of footnotes, said sidebar being able to be reviewed separately, and the manuscript being able to be printed out without the footnotes. But it might be worth thinking about writing using a Wiki, so any reference to a character name generates a hyperlink which goes to a page on that character. Except that with a Wiki, it only automatically links WikiWords, so you'd have to remember to force character names to be Wiki'd.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Now all you need is for Doodles to comment and your day is complete!

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Ah... hmm.

Revar was probably closest to the comments I'd have liked, ironically--right idea, wrong task.

I talked to a few people online who had reactions along the lines of, "The only problem I have with Word is formatting sometimes" or "if I do something complicated in formatting I'll be bringing it into a desktop publishing program," which misses the point entirely. Good programming editors have functions that make writing your code easier. From a text writing standpoint, the print output is the equivalent of the compiled executable; improving it isn't really necessary. The things I listed in my entry were things that (can) make writing a story--or any long document--easier.

Unfortunately, I think there's *another* analogy to coding to be made: until someone actually uses a programming editor with all those neat features like automatic indenting, syntax highlighting, commenting blocks, and so on, they're not going to see the value in them. After all, you can write code in plain vi just fine, right? In the word processing arena, we've gotten so used to editing documents essentially the same way in *all* GUI programs that we don't even question whether the program we're composing in really *could* be making our work a little easier. The paradigm used by nearly every program (non-persistent selection, one clipboard, modal search and replace, motion by line but not by sentence) is essentially the same as MacWrite's was in 1985. Because that concept "won" in the marketplace, other approaches have faded, and there's been very little improvement since (and almost none in terms of keyboard navigation).

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I made a decision to respond to your post even though I had nothing useful to say. :) It usually works out pretty well for me.

And along those lines, I never think of how my writing will look when it's published, because it won't be. I mean, not on real paper. I change the HTML formatting around sometimes, though.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

If I had to really think seriously about what would make, say, writing a novel easier, I'd have to say "chapter awareness" or "section awareness." In other words, the program would recognize different chapters and allow you to summarize them ("The scene where Character B learns he's a new father." "The chapter were the first spaceship explodes.") You could see a list on one side of all the chapters with their summaries, and perhaps click on them to get the first paragraph or whatever.

When I'm writing something long, I tend to hold in my head the general structure of the narrative, but details require me to re-read. I'm made this a part of my novel-writing process, and in that sense it's become a good thing: it means by the time I'm done with the manuscript, I've edited it at least three or four times, and now all I have to do is read the whole thing for end-to-end continuity. But still, such a "section awareness" would be helpful.