The write tool for the job

For small talks, I present in Tinderbox; for large audiences, I move to Keynote.

For papers, where styles tend to be defined by Word templates, I export to HTML and import the first draft in Word. Apply the appropriate style template, revise to length, and all is well. I'm doing more writing in Word this week, and though much (and sometimes justly) maligned, it's not as bad as many think.

For diagrams, I'm using Graffle. For images, Painter and Fireworks.

I also love Flying Meat's FlySketch. If a client wants a quick graphic in a piece I no longer have create things from scratch. If I can find something that fits the bill in a PPT, PDF, or web page I grab it with FlySketch and save it as a jpeg. If it needs modifying I do that with Intaglio from PurgatoryDesigns (http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/) where I also create any from-scratch graphics I need. My clients inevitably use a graphic designer to do document formating and illustration work but the FLySketch graphics serve as useful placeholders.

I've also been using TextLightning from MetaObject (http://www.metaobject.com/Home.html) to cull copy from PDF files into a text file. Useful for existing blocks of copy that have to be included in a piece. I have to say I don't really like this product much. It tends to smush a lot of words together and does dumb things - like transcibes all manner of incidental text making the output document a nightmare to go through. I'm not even sure it's better than cut and paste from a PDF but I still use it when I have to.

For general small business office utilities I use MaxEmail (http://www.maxemail.com/) for fax services. When I'm emailed or faxed a contract from a client I open the PDF file with PDFPen from SmileOnMyMac (http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/index.html) and insert a jpeg signature before faxing back through MaxEmail.

I find "word processors" to be huge, slow, painful, and inept at helping me do anything. I spend the vast majority of my time with one fixing its broken behaviors and very little time writing. With LyX, I spend 2 seconds once in a while telling it I'm beginning a new section or sub-section or chapter or list or whatever, that's it.

Otherwise, I use a handful of what I'd call utility apps: OmniOutliner for lists and outlines and notes and lists with notes (I love it); VoodooPad and/or Yojimbo for "writing things down" (mostly Yojimbo now); ecto for blog posts.

TextWrangler is fast becoming a favorite for its ability to wrestle plain text into place. My most common uses: set a soft wrap and later convert it to hard wrap, straighten quotes, set selections to all caps, zap gremlins, normalize line endings and find/replace with regex. Being able to use its FTP/SFTP capability is nice though mostly I use Dreamweaver, with Dreamweaver based projects, and Cyberduck, for everything else, for that. Cyberduck actually has a very useful integration with Smultron that allows you to rapidly edit online documents right from within the FTP program.

For editing programming related items, conf files, etc. I often use Smultron (or nano or vim if I am working in Terminal). Most of my original programming work is PHP/MySQL related and for that I often use Dreamweaver (super fast application development plus good project management tools) and Zend Studio (debugging and code analysis). I also try to start using Eclipse every couple of months but it never sticks. Dreamweaver also gets most of my HTML and CSS work, BTW.

For documents, which I usually am editing for other people, I use Microsoft Word (OpenOffice cannot match Word's commenting ability... not anywhere near as useful or visually pleasing plus the people I am editing all use Word and this makes compatibility a non-issue. In the past, I tried OpenOffice and some people complained of strange results when viewing in Word).

All of my organizing is done via Dreamweaver's project management capabilities or good old Finder. I don't use Outliners as they just don't work for me

So I'm going back to my gnarly (but much-improved) roots: Vim for editing, groff for formatting. If I need to share source with the unenlightened, I can format to HTML and they can open that in Word.

Anyone else willing to give this a shot should have a look at http://unixtext.org/

The learning curve of LaTeX is extensive but it is also extremely rewarding. If you touch type and what writer doesn't? Then you should seriously start messing around with LaTeX. It produces wonderfully formatted documents and the PDF abilities are awesome. I've seen entire presentations done in PDF with full navigation, layers, etc. It can be done, but it does take longer to setup a new layout in LaTeX. But then you don't have to think about layout once that part is complete. You can focus on the content instead. Instead of WYSIWYG it becomes WYSIWYN (What You See Is What You Need). LyX is a good front end to LaTeX that tries to display the results while you enter it. It's more of a compromise between editing LaTeX source by hand and WYSIWYG. Try LyX first to ween yourself off WYSIWYG then get into learning more about LaTeX.