You'd think the media -- which lacked anything approaching an appreciation for what was really happening on the ground -- would have flocked to his door given that his book was largely coming true before everyone's eyes, but sadly, they passed, rounding up all the usual suspects instead.
So much WJW's shot at popular fame and fortune (not to mention a slot on Dancing With The Stars).
]]>Markdown is about as easy as it gets, and while both systems are very easy to use, they offer real version control, collaborative editing and commenting, and export into whatever you want. Draft is a little like the writer's version of Github (but easier), and while both are pretty clearly oriented towards producing text for online use, a slightly customized version would seem to offer a lot of advantages for a publisher.
Writers could write in whatever the hell they wanted; once the text was in place in the system, everything would be versioned and recorded and there would be far fewer issues with conflicting edits/comments (a bigger problem in the copywriting world than yours).
I'm introducing a pair of clients to Editorially now, and happily writing my copy in a text editor (originally Emacs [proving taste is alive and well], though once I learned I could get Emacs keybindings in Sublime Text, I've been seduced).
I prefer ReStructuredText to Markdown, but MD is where the momentum lies; either is far, far better than the dreaded .docx.
]]>In any case, those of us who make a living with Linux salute you for the testimonial, though I know you're never going to switch -- at least not until you can get MS Word in a Linux version.
]]>It seems the Interwebs have spawned a lot of new tools for researchers and programmers, but it's done damned little for writers. Perhaps that's starting to change.
I've wrestled with a lot of writing tools since I started working professionally on a System 36 (Displaywrite?). 27+ years later I freelance, and spend most of my time writing in Emacs or Sublime Text (Linux), sending the resulting multiMarkdown to Pandoc for conversion to a format the rest of the world considers useful. (What's astonishing is how I now need to hide my writing process from clients, most of whom seem to believe real writers use MS Word. One client graciously offered me a reduced price copy, assuming I didn't own it because I couldn't afford it.)
I still get .docx files from clients, but LibreOffice 4 opens them nicely (admittedly, I rarely receive complex documents), and I just smile when clients and editors ask for a Word file -- despite the fact it's the least useful format extant given the destination of the work.
Now I see the emergence of collaborative editing environments like Draft and Editorially (most are based on Markdown), and wonder if the era of Github for Writers is finally arriving. Version control, document portability, One True Version of the document (I know from grim personal experience the horrors of multiple versions of the truth), multiple layers of comments, etc... These are good things.
Convincing a client to register for yet another online account isn't yet in the cards, but I live in hope that my highly productive text editor/markup language front end will someday dovetail nicely with a client's systems (was going to say "backend" here, probably an error).
For some clients -- who pay me to manage their online presence -- it already does.
]]>Is this the result of an uninformed populace, or simply a profitable state of being for a whole bunch of folks?
Or in even simpler terms, isn't there money to be made from fear?
I'm not alleging a giant conspiracy, just a mutual level of comfort with a certain level of paranoia.
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