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Adventures in word processing
Apparently it's been announced that the upcoming release of the Mac OS (what are they up to now? Jaguarundi? Housecat?) will no longer support PowerPC apps. On the one hand, I suppose I can understand this, since it's been, what, 5 years since they started manufacturing all their computers with Intel hardware. On the other hand, HOW FAST DO YOU PEOPLE EXPECT ME TO LEARN NEW SOFTWARE. XD I've only just managed to wean myself off the last of my OS 9 apps in the last few years, and they haven't manufactured that system since the '90s!
... so basically, the next time I buy a computer, most of the programs I use will no longer work. Foo. Aside from just having to apply my dinosaur-like brain to learning new software, the area where this gives me the biggest headache (and cause for concern) is in the realm of word processors.
I've been using AppleWorks since 1998. I like AppleWorks. It's a very simple, small, quick-to-load-and-run program that doesn't try to do anything special for me (no grammar-checking, no autocorrect) and -- perhaps this is the single thing I like most about it -- saves totally clean HTML: no kludgy stylesheets or special tags beyond the ones *I* want to include, which mostly consists of italics and the odd bit of centering. What this means is that I don't have to hand-code tags for posting to LJ. Which I like.
But AppleWorks is not without its problems, most of them stemming from the fact that Apple not only no longer supports it, but hasn't supported it since (I am not kidding) 2004. Among other things, it only has one level of undo, crashes a lot, has to be reinstalled regularly or it won't run at all, and is basically living on borrowed time, if not actual life support. I am not too freaked by the whole idea of using a new word processor (I've downloaded OpenOffice and I am cautiously liking it so far), but what does worry me a hell of a lot is backwards compatibility with my old files. And I'm not talking about just right now; I'm talking 5, 10, 20 years in the future.
I have literally thousands of AppleWorks files scattered all over my hard drive. Short stories. Novels. Comic scripts. Character sheets. Notes for novels as yet unwritten. In my teens I handwrote everything in longhand, and I still regularly go back and reference the notebooks that I meticulously kept -- because some of my current novels saw their first incarnations in the early '90s, and because even many of the abandoned stories have characters or worlds that I would like to steal for other, later, better stories.
All is not completely lost with AppleWorks, because, even if the program stopped working tomorrow, I can still open the files as plain text and get out the content, even if I'd lose the formatting. I suspect that, at least in my lifetime, there will always be plain text editors or some equivalent. OpenOffice, on the other hand, saves files as XML directories, and these cannot be opened with a text editor. If, 20 years from now, OpenOffice no longer exists and there's nothing that can handle XML, then anything I write in OpenOffice will be utterly lost to me. And, as a writer, that freaks me the hell out. Losing all my files, everything I've written, is pretty much my worst nightmare except for the ones that involve losing body parts or loved ones.
... which leaves me wondering what to dooooo. The idea of writing all my rough drafts in plain text is something I've been floating from time to time (I already write my shorter fic that way), but I really do like having access to italics and spell check. But, since I'm jumping ship from AppleWorks anyway, I'd like to switch to a word processor that gives me the best possible chances of long-term backwards compatibility. I figure OpenOffice is likely to have a nice long shelf life, but the fact that .odt files cannot be opened in anything other than OpenOffice freaks me right the hell out. I don't like it. I want the backup Plan B of being able to open the files in some other program, even if it's not ideal -- my AppleWorks files don't look pretty when I open them in BBEdit (my plain text program), but all the words are there, the information is there.
I'm starting to see why some of the more old-school writers (of the pre-computer generation) print out all their files on a regular basis. Possibly I should do that.
In the meantime, I decided to try writing my new novel in OpenOffice to see how it works for me. I wrote a couple thousand words last night and, after I figured out how to turn off all the stuff I didn't want (AUTOCORRECT, I HATES IT) and got used to the slightly different-looking user interface, I like it pretty well. At the very least, having more than one level of undo is nice.
... so basically, the next time I buy a computer, most of the programs I use will no longer work. Foo. Aside from just having to apply my dinosaur-like brain to learning new software, the area where this gives me the biggest headache (and cause for concern) is in the realm of word processors.
I've been using AppleWorks since 1998. I like AppleWorks. It's a very simple, small, quick-to-load-and-run program that doesn't try to do anything special for me (no grammar-checking, no autocorrect) and -- perhaps this is the single thing I like most about it -- saves totally clean HTML: no kludgy stylesheets or special tags beyond the ones *I* want to include, which mostly consists of italics and the odd bit of centering. What this means is that I don't have to hand-code tags for posting to LJ. Which I like.
But AppleWorks is not without its problems, most of them stemming from the fact that Apple not only no longer supports it, but hasn't supported it since (I am not kidding) 2004. Among other things, it only has one level of undo, crashes a lot, has to be reinstalled regularly or it won't run at all, and is basically living on borrowed time, if not actual life support. I am not too freaked by the whole idea of using a new word processor (I've downloaded OpenOffice and I am cautiously liking it so far), but what does worry me a hell of a lot is backwards compatibility with my old files. And I'm not talking about just right now; I'm talking 5, 10, 20 years in the future.
I have literally thousands of AppleWorks files scattered all over my hard drive. Short stories. Novels. Comic scripts. Character sheets. Notes for novels as yet unwritten. In my teens I handwrote everything in longhand, and I still regularly go back and reference the notebooks that I meticulously kept -- because some of my current novels saw their first incarnations in the early '90s, and because even many of the abandoned stories have characters or worlds that I would like to steal for other, later, better stories.
All is not completely lost with AppleWorks, because, even if the program stopped working tomorrow, I can still open the files as plain text and get out the content, even if I'd lose the formatting. I suspect that, at least in my lifetime, there will always be plain text editors or some equivalent. OpenOffice, on the other hand, saves files as XML directories, and these cannot be opened with a text editor. If, 20 years from now, OpenOffice no longer exists and there's nothing that can handle XML, then anything I write in OpenOffice will be utterly lost to me. And, as a writer, that freaks me the hell out. Losing all my files, everything I've written, is pretty much my worst nightmare except for the ones that involve losing body parts or loved ones.
... which leaves me wondering what to dooooo. The idea of writing all my rough drafts in plain text is something I've been floating from time to time (I already write my shorter fic that way), but I really do like having access to italics and spell check. But, since I'm jumping ship from AppleWorks anyway, I'd like to switch to a word processor that gives me the best possible chances of long-term backwards compatibility. I figure OpenOffice is likely to have a nice long shelf life, but the fact that .odt files cannot be opened in anything other than OpenOffice freaks me right the hell out. I don't like it. I want the backup Plan B of being able to open the files in some other program, even if it's not ideal -- my AppleWorks files don't look pretty when I open them in BBEdit (my plain text program), but all the words are there, the information is there.
I'm starting to see why some of the more old-school writers (of the pre-computer generation) print out all their files on a regular basis. Possibly I should do that.
In the meantime, I decided to try writing my new novel in OpenOffice to see how it works for me. I wrote a couple thousand words last night and, after I figured out how to turn off all the stuff I didn't want (AUTOCORRECT, I HATES IT) and got used to the slightly different-looking user interface, I like it pretty well. At the very least, having more than one level of undo is nice.
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Also, I'm pretty sure that you can save as .txt. Ah, yes here - a full list of file types you can open, and save as. :)
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I still sometimes start stories and sections in longhand in a notebook, then transcribe. Works like priming the pump.
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I can't advise, since I don't know Mac or OO. (Though I learned WP on Appleworks, and loved it.)
I think I'd take all the bits and pieces of unfinished and/or unposted stories, copy each and paste the raw data in a private DW post. (One story per post, of course.) Then you can open the "edit entry" and copy the raw data into whatever program is current.
I know; things change so fast, I worry about losing stories, too. In the long run, I'm not sure even multiple redundancies will carry us through; all we can do is try.
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backing up in multiple places
Yes. I have my fic* in DW, ASR3 (a Sentinel-specific archive) and AO3. But when Geocities shut down, we learned that even archives may fail us. I'm pinning my hopes to AO3; being fan-run, and (hopefully) passing the torch from fan-generation to fan-generation, maybe it'll remain current, whatever the technological changes.
*I have 50 stories on DW; so far I've copied 14 to ASR3 and AO3. I need to get on that but, despite the advances that make posting so much easier than previously, it's still a time-sink.
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I also hate when my favorite programs become obsolete for no good reason. :(
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And, yeah, there's a sort of built-in obsolescence thing that happens with computers and computer software that is really frustrating to me. There's no reason why we need a new version of software or the operating system every few months.
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