Back to the text file?

Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 12, 2006 at 07:42 PM

Chris -

I’m still not quite sure where I am going with this, or what triggered it.

1. One aspect was your concern about future-proofing data when archiving it, and thinking - like you - that plain text seemed the best way.

2. Another consideration was making all my data as available as possible to the other programs I use - in particular, to Zoot (see 3.) and to indexed search programs. I was tired of finding that, although the best of these programs will find and index text in ANY file, the display of “hits” is often poor.

3. I wanted to standardize on Zoot “as is” - i.e. not wait for the new 32-bit version, or rich-text editor, etc - and just accept it for the very fine plain-text program it is. Since Zoot works so well with Outlook - which is itself all about “text” - and has its incredible Zooter for receiving and sending textual data to/from other programs, these were added reasons for standardizing on it.

4. I wanted to explore various ideas about splitting up the roles of writing, styling and formatting when drafting articles and books, and not trying to do everything at one and the same time (and in one program, MS-Word, which I admire, but don’t feel comfortable working in). One reason was to reduce distractions when writing; another was to be able easily to produce plain text (see 2.) - preferably as a default output.

5. When downloading information from the web, I wanted to try to discipline my temptation to download entire web-pages. Instead, l need to move towards extracting the information and linking it either to the original URL or - if I really need one - to a local copy of the web-page. The same goes for pdf files - extract the text (using OCR where the pdf is an image file), and link to the URL or a local pdf copy.

6. As far as outlining is concerned I don’t anticipate problems; most modern programs can export to plain text as well as to MS-Word. Older applications like Grandview can export to text and to structured text for export to a more modern outliners, and then on to Word.

A lot of these things I do already (sporadically…), or have done in the past. Obviously there are some hurdles to his approach. Zoot needs a better editor, whether rtf or not. It also needs to be able to handle longer notes, and more folders. But the move to 32-bit alone will solve many of these problems. Meanwhile one can usually work productively within these constraints. Zoot databases can be exported easily to text (e.g., csv), and making more use of delimited fields within Zoot enables more metadata to be exported, too.

With regard to point 4, I’m still thinking about the LaTeX route, maybe with Lyx, but this still distracts from writing IMHO. So I will probably settle for using a plain-text editor for all my drafting - maybe with a few ad hoc markups for headings and emphasis - and leave everything else (styling, formatting - including integration of charts, tables, footnotes or endnotes, references, etc) until later. In this scenario, working in MS-Word (or even Lyx) would be postponed until the final stages.

One drastic simplification would be to use Darkroom - http://they.misled.us/dark-room . Another might be to go back to a DOS program like PC-Write that uses dot commands and a limited number of non-ASCII codes to mark up for emphasis (italics, underline, bold), but whose files are simply structured and eminently readable quasi-ASCII ones.

This way of working is probably most useful for longer articles, reports and books. But trying to get as much of one’s information into plain text has the wider benefits I mentioned above.

Derek