Thoughts about WriteRight

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Reading through all the mails about what a text processor should offer, I'm starting to wonder whether I should ignore all the applications that are available and simply write my diploma thesis in XHTML using Style Sheets. This offers some interesting benefits:

- - You don't get cornered into a proprietary format. In fact, you can use any text editor and switch editors whenever you want to - - There's no problem with document size - - Everyone can read XHTML documents - - It's easy to publish your documents - - XML allows for some neat transformations into other formats (for example using XSLT) or even databases - - It's structured and, as Carl S Zimmerman calls it, "visible"

There's probably more, but that's what I can think of right now.

On the minus side, writing XHTML is not WYSIWYG or even particularly easy or enjoyable, and CSS lacks some more advanced typography features.

Mellel sounds nice, too, so I'll have a look at it before committing to anything. The only thing I find annyong after a quick first look is that it seems to use the brushed metal windows. I dislike them, so I've disabled them, but Mellel looks kind of weird now.

CopyWrite has some very neat features, like the whole "project approach" and the automatic backup, but as far as I can see, there are no styles, and it doesn't even seem to support pictures (I tried to paste one into a text file, it didn't work).

lucas

- -- "Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny." -- Carl Schurz

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On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 4:04 pm -0700, Mark D. McKean wrote:

>Word 5.1 got me through college without a hitch, and was, I think,
>far closer to WriteRight than Word X is. The only real disadvantage to using
>it nowadays is that it can't open native files from the last ten years'
>worth of Word revisions.

Actually it's not quite that bad; there is a converter available from the
Microsoft site, which enables 5.1 to import files from Word 97 (Windows)
and 98 (Mac). It's in the 'Office 98' downloads section.

Tim H

Yes sad but true Word is the default and while Adam and his readers' feature wish list is admirable I have a much more basic request. I would certainly pay money for any competition that would keep its preferences set by the user.

Dam and hell there is a new version of office out right now which may fix this ongoing bug (ha!) but if I had a dollar for every time I had to visit the menus to reset ....

File/Page setup - to A4 NOT US Letter

Tools/Language - Aus English NOT US English

I have endured many versions of Word on many Macs and this problem just never seems to go away.

While some may hint at covert US operations to take over world standards it seems more likely to be just plain Microsoft sloppy programming.

Finally the two programs that regularly crash under OS X - Word and Explorer ·still have to use the latter as Safari just can't cope with some sites).

And where the hell is OS X Open Office?

cheers

PeterW

On Friday, May 21, 2004, at 07:04 PM, Mark D. McKean wrote:

>
> on 5/20/04 10:49 pm, Harvey, Michael at MHarveyventuracountystar.com
> wrote:
>
>
>
> Sadly, I still think the pinnacle of Macintosh word processing was
> Word 5.1.

I must admit that Adam and Tonya had the usually super-cynical me
totally April fooled a few years ago when he circulated the annual
special issue that began with an article about MS issuing a version of
Word 5.1 for OS X. I was delighted that I ran around the office
announcing the good news and sent a copy of the item to some friends:

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07139

As I read the rest of the issue I realized the joke. So you're not
alone in your enthusiasm for the swift, svelte and intuitive Word 5.1
;-)

Marilyn

I was rather surprised that Adam didn't have a stronger affection for Nisus Writer Express given that he has previously championed the classic version as his preferred word processor. Was he aware that Version 2 has been announced? That announcement probably coincided with his writing of the WriteRight article.

NME v2 will add some needed functionality but probably still has quite a way to go before it will completely fulfill Adam's wish list.

There's a lot of inertia in this market given that Word will continue to be part of MS Office for the foreseeable future and Quark has still got its niche amongst the newspaper, magazine and book publishing enterprises. This means that software vying for a share if this market has to (a) have an excellent feature set, (b) be compatible with existing file formats, and (c) have a marketing plan that works.

We don't write magazine or newspaper articles, nor do we write books, but as we move to OS X, a replacement for Word 5.1 has been needed. We voted with our wallet for Nisus Writer Express (NWE) once we saw that the file format could be placed in InDesign.

As a word processor NME has one very neat feature (magnification) that didn't feature in Adam's wish list. On the fly magnification (without having to go into Preview mode) is a God send when you are trying to edit punctuation, create fractions or use a font that does not render well on screen.

Another feature which I think will become increasingly important in published work is Adobe's new type engine for text layout that is now integrated into InDesign and Illustrator. And, since a lot of the features that Adam seeks for WriteRight are already present in InDesign, I'm left wondering how long it will be before he uses this page layout program as his favourite word processor.

At 16:04 -0700 2004.05.21, mfrischknecht wrote about FrameMaker:

>- it's missing any kind of outlining mode; there's a third-party
>  plug-in that offers this but it only exists for the Windows version
>  of FrameMaker...

Look at
   http://www.siliconprairiesoftware.com
which now lists a Mac version of their outline plug-in for Frame,
as well as some other interesting plug-ins. I've not yet tried these
tools but am about to.

Art Evans

On 19-05-2004 18:19:23, Carl S Zimmerman wrote:

>Within Adam's excellent list of features essential for The Writer's
>Word Processor, I don't find one thing which I consider essential.
>Perhaps that's because it's more of a characteristic than a feature.
>For lack of a better name, I call it "visibility". Among the many
>word processors I have used over the years, only WordPerfect has it,
>which is why I'm still using WP 3.5 under MacOS 8.1 as my primary
>word processor.
>
>What I mean by "visibility" is the ability to see *exactly* the scope
>of any particular attributes applied to bits of document text, be it
>a style, a font, a tab setting, or whatever. WordPerfect provides
>visibility through its Reveal Codes feature, and while that may be
>too much "down in the dirt" for some people, it does the trick for
>me. If any other word processor provides equivalent functionality, I
>haven't seen it yet.
...

>The hypothetical WriteRight ought to give its users complete control
>over whether or not attributes are copied/moved/deleted along with
>text, plus complete visibility into how and where attributes are
>applied. Whether there is another technology besides WordPerfect's
>for doing that, I do not know.

Score another point for FrameMaker...
1. All styles apply to a well-defined section of the document, and their
behavior is entirely predictable.
2. You can see, while in WYSIWYG mode, exactly which styles apply to a
section. No "Reveal Codes" required. This also avoids the nasty problems
WP's method has (problems like nesting those codes incorrectly, removing an
'end formatting X' code accidentally, etc.).
3. You can copy a section of text either with or without styles, or just
the style itself.

The result is that you really do have WYSIWYG, and because there's no
ambiguity in the properties of a given section, it's easy to do things like
globally changing a style, or using those styles to export the document to
HTML or other formats (even XML) and getting valid output.

Harro de Jong

In TidBITS#730/17-May-04, Adam C. Engst wrote:

>**Auto-Save** --

IMO, this should be a system-level service, not something every application
should reinvent. It's ridiculous that there's still such a thing as losing
unsaved data.

>**Document Management Server** --

WebWorks FinalDraft promises to do something like this. Unfortunately, it's
Windows-only...

>**And One File Format to Rule Them All** --

But let's not stop there (RTF). WriteRight should be able to export to
formats like HTML and XML, and it should be able to do this so well that
subsequent editing of the output isn't necessary. XML should be a roundtrip
format.

The ability to interface with tools like Quadralay's Webworks Publisher and
Wordhelp, and Omni System's Mif2Go would be even better. These are export
tools that can be used to generate HTML, and a variety of help system
formats. They also allow extensive customization of the output, so these
tools can be used to generate output in just about any format you want.

Harro de Jong

On 5/24/04 11:57 AM, "dtopcomp" <dtopcompwave.co.nz> wrote:

> Another feature which I think will become increasingly important in published
> work is Adobe's new type engine for text layout that is now integrated into
> InDesign and Illustrator. And, since a lot of the features that Adam seeks for
> WriteRight are already present in InDesign, I'm left wondering how long it
> will be before he uses this page layout program as his favourite word
> processor.

Not until you get the book houses to take anything but Word files. O'Reilly
takes Postscript and some others. But you'd have to get publishers to deal
with not-Word better.

And honestly...I don't see a need to switch for my needs. I have basically
two word processors...ecto and Word. They are used for different things, but
they are excellent products. Anything that would get me to switch would have
to be better, not just different, and it would have to NOT make me relearn
everything I do now.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 5/24/04 11:57 AM, "HJongtriview.nl" <HJongtriview.nl> wrote:

>> **Auto-Save** --
>
> IMO, this should be a system-level service, not something every application
> should reinvent. It's ridiculous that there's still such a thing as losing
> unsaved data.

How do you do this? If you use the hypercard/filemaker model, then backing
out changes becomes difficult. If I do something in word that's just
fubar'd, I can quit without saving, and bang! Bad changes begone. If it's
autosaved, I can't do that.

Do you save multiple versions of the file? If so, when? Where? What do you
do on application quit?

There's no "one size fits all here".

john

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 5/24/04 at roughly 9:57 AM, thus spake LKM <tidbitslkmc.ch>:

>I'm starting to wonder whether I should ignore all the applications that
>are available and simply write my diploma thesis in XHTML using Style
>Sheets. This offers some interesting benefits:
>
>- - You don't get cornered into a proprietary format. In fact, you can use
>  any text editor and switch editors whenever you want to
>- - There's no problem with document size
>- - Everyone can read XHTML documents
>- - It's easy to publish your documents
>- - XML allows for some neat transformations into other formats (for
>  example using XSLT) or even databases
>- - It's structured and, as Carl S Zimmerman calls it, "visible"
>
>There's probably more, but that's what I can think of right now.
>
>On the minus side, writing XHTML is not WYSIWYG or even particularly
>easy or enjoyable, and CSS lacks some more advanced typography features.

A little-known fact is that FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML are now rolled
into one product. So Frame is now a *fantastic* XML editor, and it *is*
WYSIWYG. So you get the best of all worlds: edit in a decent WYSIWYG, output
as XML and do what you like with it, output as HTML, output as PDF... The
end of Mac support for this wonderful product is really sad. I've written
three O'Reilly books with it. m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matttidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide! NOW SHIPPING...! (Finally.)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005571/somethingsbymatt
Subscribe to TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com/

On 5/24/04 at 2:19 PM, jwelchbynkii.com (John C. Welch) wrote:

>On 5/24/04 11:57 AM, "HJongtriview.nl" <HJongtriview.nl> wrote:

>>>**Auto-Save** --

>>IMO, this should be a system-level service, not something every
>>application should reinvent. It's ridiculous that there's still
>>such a thing as losing unsaved data.

>How do you do this? If you use the hypercard/filemaker model, then
>backing out changes becomes difficult. If I do something in word
>that's just fubar'd, I can quit without saving, and bang! Bad
>changes begone. If it's autosaved, I can't do that.

I suppose if this were implemented it would still be possible to kill a process using terminal summarily bypassing any auto-save feature. But this certainly wouldn't be either a user friendly or application friendly way to get around an auto-save feature.

But I do agree all too often I did something to mess up a file and the fact my error wasn't auto-saved to a file was a lifesaver. Additionally, in one of the applications I use heavily, I often open windows to do something I've no intention of saving ever. For these reasons, from my perspective it would be essential to be able to disable any auto-save feature.

>>>**Auto-Save** --
>>
>>IMO, this should be a system-level service, not something every application
>>should reinvent. It's ridiculous that there's still such a thing as losing
>>unsaved data.
>
> How do you do this? If you use the hypercard/filemaker model, then backing
> out changes becomes difficult. If I do something in word that's just
> fubar'd, I can quit without saving, and bang! Bad changes begone. If it's
> autosaved, I can't do that.
>
> Do you save multiple versions of the file? If so, when? Where? What do you
> do on application quit?
>
> There's no "one size fits all here".

I work with CAD users and I just can't see what makes sense for CAD to make
sense for Word or Photoshop. This has to be application specific.

BUT BUT BUT what I would love is that the system support generational saves
such that you have the last x number of saves to which you can refer.
Architects are continually using the restore function of the daily backup
to get that file as it was a day or two ago.

On 24-05-2004 23:19:38, John C. Welch wrote:

>On 5/24/04 11:57 AM, "HJongtriview.nl" <HJongtriview.nl> wrote:
>
>>> **Auto-Save** --
>>
>> IMO, this should be a system-level service, not something every
application
>> should reinvent. It's ridiculous that there's still such a thing as
losing
>> unsaved data.
>
>How do you do this? If you use the hypercard/filemaker model, then backing
>out changes becomes difficult. If I do something in word that's just
>fubar'd, I can quit without saving, and bang! Bad changes begone. If it's
>autosaved, I can't do that.

Having more than one level of Undo (maybe with a palette like in Photoshop)
would help here. You could even consider saving the Undo information along
with the file so you can undo changes you made in a previous session.

Or do it the other way around: don't autosave, but keep a log of actions,
and apply that to the document file when you close the document.

>Do you save multiple versions of the file? If so, when? Where? What do you
>do on application quit?

On the VMS system, you'd get a new file every time you saved. A version
number was appended to the file name. FrameMaker can be set to back up the
previous version of your document.

>There's no "one size fits all here".

Maybe not, but there's got to be something better than the "no size at all
here" we have now.

Harro de Jong

On 5/25/04 at roughly 7:10 AM, thus spake Bill Rowe
<bitreaderearthlink.net>:

>On 5/24/04 at 2:19 PM, jwelchbynkii.com (John C. Welch)
>wrote:
>
>>On 5/24/04 11:57 AM, "HJongtriview.nl"
>><HJongtriview.nl> wrote:
>
>>>>**Auto-Save** --
>
>>>IMO, this should be a system-level service, not
>>>something every application should reinvent. It's
>>>ridiculous that there's still such a thing as losing
>>>unsaved data.
>
>>How do you do this? If you use the hypercard/filemaker
>>model, then backing out changes becomes difficult. If I
>>do something in word that's just fubar'd, I can quit
>>without saving, and bang! Bad changes begone. If it's
>>autosaved, I can't do that.
>
>I do agree all too often I did something to mess up a file
>and the fact my error wasn't auto-saved to a file was a
>lifesaver. Additionally, in one of the applications I use
>heavily, I often open windows to do something I've no
>intention of saving ever. For these reasons, from my
>perspective it would be essential to be able to disable
>any auto-save feature.

I keep waiting for someone to mention Flashback. This ingenious product,
created by 6prime's Eric Soldan and Tantek Çelik and eventually taken over
by Aladdin, would track designated documents and copy them periodically or
after each save. This was not auto-save - you still had to save your
document manually - but every time you did save it, a revision snapshot was
automatically taken for you, so later you could restore to any previous
stage of the document if need be.

There is no reason by something similar could not be done on Mac OS X.
Chronopath's Restore is a primitive version of the same thing, and despite
its shortcomings I found it very helpful during development of a large
mission-critical document.

A little-known feature of Microsoft Word, by the way, is that it can, on
request, save a current snapshot of your document (a "version") into the
document itself.

It seems to me that this periodic revision/version saving is what's really
valuable, much more than auto-save. m.
--
matt neuburg, phd = matttidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide! NOW SHIPPING...! (Finally.)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005571/somethingsbymatt
Subscribe to TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com/

[I think the basic points about auto-save have been made, so let's allow this branch of the thread to die. -Adam]

On 5/25/04 9:10 AM, "HJongtriview.nl" <HJongtriview.nl> wrote:

>> There's no "one size fits all here".
>
> Maybe not, but there's got to be something better than the "no size at all
> here" we have now.

Actually, that's not entirely correct. Autosave is an application - specific
feature, and each implementation is suited for that particular application.
Which is as it should be. How is apple going to know which method is perfect
for every application and ever situation?

Where do you save by default? The obvious answer is "your home directory".
Well, ask a lab administrator in a school with network homes and iMovie
being taught if they want 30 computers autosaving iMovie to servers.

To a local directory? Then how do you handle network homes?

Does Apple implement a monster checklist where you go in and set this up for
every application? That's no advantage over just letting the application
deal with it.

What method do you use for the default auto-save? None? Then you have the
current system.

Do you force it on all applications? What if you just are doing, as I do
with BBEdit a LOT, and just using a document as a text clipping holder? I
don't want that crap saved. Oy vey, then you have to name it, decide where
it goes...gah!

Auto save to a single file? Then backing out changes becomes difficult
unless the application supports unlimited undos and can track them across
document launches. Of course, now you're basically journaling every file.
Where do you store this info? Do you store it in the file? Now your files
get MUCH larger. Do you store it in a separate file? Then you lose it if you
move to another machine.

Multiple files? That's going to suck for Photoshop, Final Cut, etc.

What if you're a developer, and you make heavy use of external source
control such as CVS? How does Apple handle that?

It's a nice idea, but it's not practical in a modern computing environment,
where you have hundreds of different file types, sizes and needs.

Yes, things like the AS/400\iSeries and VMS support this. Well, on an
AS/400, everything you do is a DB2/400 operation. You are ALWAYS doing DB
ops. That's the file system. While an AS/400 can serve humongous amounts of
data and handle FAR and away more clients than a rack of Xserves, the actual
data operations it deals with are fairly straightforward. You aren't running
word/fcp/email/etc. Directly on a machine like that.

The same for VMS. Those are fairly dedicated use machines. They have a
rather narrow range of direct uses.

For a machine like my PowerBook, which in the course of a day, is doing
anything from development, to page layout, Photoshop work, DVD building,
video editing, network administrator work, testing, writing and anything
else it may need to do, there's no WAY a single autosave scheme will work.

Let it be implemented on an application basis, as it should be.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

Matt Neuburg wrote

A little-known fact is that FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML are now rolled into one product. So Frame is now a *fantastic* XML editor, and it *is* WYSIWYG. So you get the best of all worlds: edit in a decent WYSIWYG, output as XML and do what you like with it, output as HTML, output as PDF... The end of Mac support for this wonderful product is really sad. I've written three O'Reilly books with it.

So, have you figured out what you'll switch to? Since I haven't yet found a FrameMaker replacement, I'm hoping you have. I'm not willing to run the last version in Classic. I'm thinking I may finally have a reason to be forced to a Windows machine. Any great ideas?

John

Thanks Adam and all contributors to this interesting thread.

Only last month, frustrated by juggling between too many programs that only do a half-way job, I went out on a search for a Cocoa word processor. As I write Mellel is the only one still under review (though its absence of column support left me wandering back last week to PageMaker for one job). I'll be awaiting furture relases with eager anticipation.

Full Unicode support is essential. Much of my work is in Mongolian, which lacks a recognised encoding scheme pre-Unicode. Thus everything required arbitrary encoding schemes and custom keyboard layouts and fonts. Converting a WinWord document is a nightmare. (Even now that WordXP does Mongolian Unicode correctly most users here use a hacked keyboard layout to get backwards compatibility. Sigh!) I assume achieving Unicode support will require that WriteRight be a Cocoa app (the only Carbon apps I have that seem to let me use Unicode with Mongolian are BBEdit and the Finder).

Regarding outline modes. I have tried a few outlining programs over the years. My current preference is for TinderBox, particularly because of the graphical metaphor (map mode) it uses (it unfortunately lacks on the Unicode side). I like to be able to put ideas down and start to develop them before having to make decisions about how to order and connect them. I also like the way it allows me to work on a small segment of text in a dedicated window so that I am not distracted by what I wrote ten minutes ago (which I can always find a way to improve).

I read a book recently where the author was praising the ‘Nota Bene’ program he had used. A quick look at their web site turned up lots of interesting features for a professional writers word processor. These included a built in note keeping feature and the ability to link to on-line bibliographical libraries to avoid having to retype all that information (this particular books bibliography ran to 39 pages). This in turn raises questions for me about whether writers in the humanities may have different requirements from authors writing about technical or computer topics. Any thoughts?

I question the need for 100% Word format compatibility. Firstly I suspect Microsoft don’t release sufficient details of the format to competing developers, thus necessitating reverse engineering of the format. This is always going to be problematic. Secondly, I think several of the features in Word are targeting the business or home market and so not suited to professional writing. To duplicate these features is surely a waste of effort. For instance, I find Word’s image handling lousy. I may be wrong but would be very surprised if the writers of Visual QuickPro guides submitted Word documents to their editors containing all their images.

[Nope. Some VQP authors submit Word documents and TIFF files; others (like me) just monkey through the layout, which is easy, in exchange for higher royalties and more control. -Adam]

Finally a comment on reference tools. I have been using SpellCatcher for years, and now that I have a large collection of custom dictionaries for different things find I cannot do without it. It is wonderful to have a system wide solution that works the same way and with the same dictionaries in all programs. Maybe developers should avoid too much replication and focus on better integration with third party tools in this area.

There's been plenty of talk about Framemaker, but I once worked with an application called Applixware. It worked on Unix and Windows, read almost all MS-Word formats, wrote MS-Word formats, and its native format was XML. This allowed you to manipulate and create documents on the fly. You could also add functionality via simple shell scripting. This was a complete package suite: Word Processing/Spread Sheet/And-whatever-else-makes-a-package-suite. At one point, Applixware was availible on Linux PPC.

Was this ever ported to Mac OS/X? I don't know if this would be your "RightWrite", but it would seem to come awful close.

[This is about all I was able to find. -Adam]

<http://www.vistasource.com/page.php?id=86>

-- David Weintraub Support me in the Tour de Cure! <http://www.weintraubworld.net/tour> davidweintraubworld.net

--On Wednesday, May 19, 2004 9:19 AM -0700 David Morrison
<ccdfmmail.newcastle.edu.au> wrote:
> This is best explained with an example. Say you have a paragraph of text
> in a style called "xxxxxx". In that text, you have a number of words you
> need to bold say, whereas the rest of the text is unbolded. You could
> define a character style for bold text and apply it to the bolded words.

Doesn't Office for the Mac work this way? It's how Office XP and 2003 work
on Windows. I create a style "TestStyle1" and apply it to a paragraph and
then bold and/or italicize some words. Word then creates styles
"TestStyle1 + Bold" and "TestStyle1 + Italic". If I then go in and edit
just the style "TestStyle1" the styles that are based on that original
style will update in the same way.

Even if I apply a new style to the whole paragraph the sub-styles are
automatically created for the new style I've applied, and the bolding and
italics are still maintained. The downside is that if you do a lot of
these modifications you end up with a style list a mile (1.6 km) long.

Any perfect word processor, as I found out while working on this message,
should include an option for preventing "cat typing" 8-)

Kevin