The write tool for the job
by Giles Turnbull
I enjoyed Rob McNair-Huff's post at Mac Net Journal detailing what tools he uses for writing.
Rob uses a combinaton of different apps for different writing and organising tasks, including OmniOutliner and Tinderbox. He also has some interesting thoughts about the use of both NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org on the Mac.
As someone who is always ready to try new writing tools on OS X, but who always ends up crawling back to the Finder and BBEdit, I found Rob's experiences particularly enlightening.
How about you folks? What writing tools do you use for which writing tasks?
12 Comments
jeb 2006-04-12 10:04:39 |
For anything programming related, HTML, Obj-C dabbling, scripts, I use TextWrangler. I'm not going pro any time soon so the upgrade to BBEdit is not worth it for me. In the CLI I use vi or nano, depends if someone's over my shoulder or not. For word processing I've been using NeoOffice/J, but the nag for updates has been bugging the HELL out of me lately. I might run back to OpenOffice.org or perhaps try out the trial version of Pages that came with my Mini. |
Mark Bernstein 2006-04-12 10:08:03 |
I use Tinderbox for making notes, and for the first draft of anything that might be hypertextual -- or that's likely to need structural editing. Being able to move things around in both outlines AND maps can't be beat, and Tinderbox's export facilities make it easy to move to presentation software.
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Nigel Hall 2006-04-12 10:29:07 |
Microsoft Word works for me. I wish I had an alternative but I can't risk any incompatibility with clients - being on a Mac is risky enough. I've tried several different tools to help the writing process, mostly to organize thoughts, record useful links, rough out ideas, and to track different projects. At the moment I'm having some success with VooDooPad from Flying Meat (http://flyingmeat.com/). It's fast and simple - two big prerequisites for me.
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Jeremey 2006-04-12 10:46:48 |
I use LyX for formal papers and engineering documents because it does all the styling and layout 100% automatically for me and generates fantastic PDF. LyX is a TeX front end, but you can install teTeX and LyX both from packages and you don't have to configure a thing, so it sounds more unfriendly than it is. Those are the only "documents" I produce in the traditional sense on a regular basis. When I need the occasional prettier document, I use Pages.
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Trevor 2006-04-12 11:24:03 |
TextMate for research papers; Pages for letters (business or personal). I'm surprised Rob talked about Nisus Writer Express but didn't even mention Pages, given that he mainly seems to be interested in Word compatibility. I've found that Pages does a much better job of importing Word documents than NWE. (I own both.) |
Stoo 2006-04-12 11:37:16 |
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 |
FARfetched 2006-04-12 12:53:28 |
I'm a technical writer, FrameMaker has been my primary writing tool at work for the last 8 years or so. Unfortunately, Adoobie [sic] never updated it to work with OSX, then dropped Mac support for it altogether. I haven't used Word since version 7 (aka Word 95), and I'm convinced that later versions are a step backward in functionality (numbering nightmares, etc.).
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Stridey 2006-04-12 15:38:48 |
I use VoodooPad for all notes, planning and drafts, but tend to shift around for what app to use with the final product. |
Nicole 2006-04-12 22:15:02 |
I'm a paralegal student in southern CA. I own Pages, NWE, and Word 2004. In a perfect world, I would use NWE for everything. The reality is, that for all of my classes there are course modules (containing sample complaints, client correspondence letters, intraoffice memoranda, etc.) that the students download from the web - and they're all in .doc format. In the legal profession, form is everything. I tried opening up the .doc files with NWE - no luck. It was slow, and it didn't translate properly. Next, I tried Pages - much, much better, but it still lagged on a trial brief that had a two-column format and a ton of HTML. So yeah......that blue 'W' now has its own special spot in my Dock. |
Nicole 2006-04-12 22:17:21 |
I also tried NeoOffice/J, but in general found it to be too sluggish. |
JBrickley 2006-04-13 06:54:02 |
TextMate for both writing in LaTeX and programming code (Ruby, Python, ObjC, JavaScript/HTML/XML, etc.) - Hopefully a future release will offer a split screen option as well as a full screen option. TeXShop for the rare occasion it comes in handy. Subversion for full revision storage and sync between multiple computers. OS X built in Dictionary/Thesaurus and Spellchecker plus Spotlight which works great with plain text like tex/latex files. Favorite font - Bitstream Vera Sans Mono a fixed width font that supports bold/italic/underline yet is still fixed width.
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Gordon Meyer 2006-04-13 11:46:40 |
I use Tinderbox for works-in-progress, then pour those contents into Word if that's what the final deliverable needs to be, or into BBedit if HTML is required. |