WriteMonkey gets better and better

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 28, 2013 at 04:17 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>This is the argument for Markdown that I don’t really get. When I’m in
>“creative” mode, I’m not even thinking about what needs to be bold or
>italic.

Well, I meant the term “creative” in the broadest possible sense, to include any kind of writing (fiction, scientific etc.) where you really need to concentrate and come up with new and good stuff.

In the academic writing that I do, emphasis is indicated by italics, to be used very sparingly, but sometimes you do need it. Also, it always must be preserved when it’s within a quote. Block quotes also need to be recorded, and headings need to be indicated. Markdown makes that very easy, and it does it relatively unobtrusively. I don’t find that my text is littered with Markdown code.

Franz Grieser wrote:
>You do not need to interrupt your typing to make sth. bold or italics or
>underline words or apply heading templates: Word, LibreOffice et.al.
>have keyboard shortcuts for that.

Sure, but here we’re talking about distraction-free writing environments, and even though Word etc. do have those shortcuts, for some reason they still don’t care to provide a full-screen distraction-free mode a la WriteMonkey etc.

Cassius wrote:
>My BIGGEST problem came
>when I discovered that the email system we were using at the FAA would
>actually CHANGE a Word document that I had emailed to someone.

Yes, this is the other big argument for staying within text editors and using some kind of a mark-up such as Markdown or LaTex, which is 100% portable across all platforms.