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Entry tags:
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.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/358775.html with
comments.
... 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.
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/358775.html with
no subject
I also adore Scrivener for my longer writing projects, and underneath the Scrivener file format it's actually saving your documents as .rtf, too. (And there's an easy export feature.)
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My other problem with RTF is that it doesn't open as plain text without having all the formatting stuff in there, because the formatting tags are themselves plain text -- so whereas with a Word .doc, for example, a plain text processor will just ignore all the formatting and spit out the text, with an RTF the useful text is buried in a sea of RTF tags, and virtually unusable unless you have a word processor that can decode RTF.
... having said that, though, I'm kind of leaning in that direction ... either that or .doc, probably, because OpenOffice can handle both and so can TextEdit. And I like writing in TextEdit -- it definitely meets all my "stripped-down, minimal features" requirements.
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My main objection to OpenOffice, I think, is how incredibly long it takes to open, and how much of a processor hog it is (especially compared to Text Edit, which opens like a snap, and is currently using a grand total of 0.5% of my processing power despite having ten windows open). But OpenOffice definitely gives more of a 'word processor' feel, so... hmm, idk.
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... I'm probably not in a good headspace for discussing this rationally right now, because asking my husband about this was really a mistake; now he's trying to convert me by sheer dint of argument to his preferred format, which is HTML. On the one hand, he is probably right that HTML is going to be around FOREVER; on the other hand, if I have to write all my fiction in HTML from now until the end of time, I'll probably bludgeon myself to death with my own keyboard. *g* In fact I just had to forbid him access to my computer because he wanted to install a script to find all my AppleWorks files and convert them to HTML. HALP.
I am actually considering shifting to a working mode where I use plain text for my rough drafts, and then switching to something that can handle italics and other formatting (TextEdit? OpenOffice?) for my second drafts. Best of both worlds, y/n?
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Yeah, that might work? I can't imagine plain text is going to disappear any time soon, so at least you'd be safe in that...
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*hides*
But, yeah, to quote myself from a comment below ... this whole process is convincing me that there simply IS no single standard for word processing in the modern world; I'm just going to have to pick one and deal with it, but as long as I pick something fairly standard, I shouldn't have too much trouble finding programs to open or convert the files for the foreseeable future.
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The reason OO files can't immediately be opened in a text program is because they're zipped to save space. If you take an OO file (whatever the extension is? .odt? .sxw? I haven't used OO in a bit) and change the extension to ".zip", you'll be able to open it as a zip folder, in which you'll see a bunch of files - one of which is "content.xml", in which you should see all your text. (Word 2010 files are the same thing.)
Er - tl;dr - short version, barring an EM pulse wiping out our entire current computer system infrastructure, the OpenOffice format should be backwards compatible for a long, long time to come!
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... probably I am being unreasonably paranoid, because if a file format exists, there is probably going to be some little freeware program somewhere on the Internet to decode and convert it to something else, especially if it's a program that was pretty big once upon a time. But I think that having this particular problem with AppleWorks is making me paranoid, because I'm facing the loss of all my text files unless I convert them to something else, and while it's not catastrophic by any means (I have plenty of advance warning, and access to all the programs I need to convert them), I hate the thought of going through all of them, converting, refiling, and then just having to do it again in 5 or 10 years because I picked a format that gets phased out when the next new thing comes along. ^^
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That being said, if you really want to be sure to preserve your stuff without worrying about conversion, just saving in plain text and typing in HTML tags to indicate formatting is probably the best way to go. If you want to save formatted text, I would recommend one of the XML formats (like .odt or .docx) because they're the most popular standards now, and therefore the most likely to have easily-available conversion tools however many decades down the line!
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... Also, if my husband doesn't stop hanging over my shoulder offering me extremely unhelpful "helpful suggestions" (mostly coming down to the general theme of "everything you are trying to do is wrong, and all your formats are going to fail"), I may have to strangle him. ^^
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Well, after the computer apocalypse if .odt and .rtf and everything else but HTMl is gone, you can always make him write you a macro to convert everything to HTML (... and .odt files will be easier to convert, so!) :P
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Wow. He sounds just like my dad! "You can do it my way or you can be wrong." According to Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format), RTF *is* being phased out, but it is still usable in several programs, including OpenOffice, so I'd be rebelling against him, too. I've more-or-less given up on the idea of salvaging my old StarOffice files (from the eMachine I bought in 1999); even though I burned them to CD, I'm pretty sure that there wasn't anything important that wasn't printed out. I hope...
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(Erm, sorry if I'm coming on strong here; believe it or not I kind of find file formats and conversion fascinating and geek out about it a bit, for all that I just save everything in docx these days anyway ^^;)
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And no, you're not coming on strong at all (at least not compared to my husband at the moment, who is seriously DRIVING ME INSANE ^^) - it's helpful to get some other opinions on it!
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I use OpenOffice for some things, particularly personal letters and notes. I have been told that LibreOffice has really replaced OpenOffice, and I tried to download it, but I failed! I need to go back and figure out why. In the meantime: OpenOffice lets you save in a variety of formats. I think if you save as .rtf, you should be golden even if OpenOffice goes under (as may happen, apparently, though LibreOffice is supposed to pick up the slack). I don't like OpenOffice as much as Word. It has more features than Bean, but it doesn't have all the things I want, and the keyboard commands don't match. Its equivalent of Track Changes is kind of awful, in my opinion, but I mostly need that when students give me OpenOffice files. (I've finally said the heck with it and will require them to save as .rtf or .doc.)
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... and I didn't know that about OpenOffice and LibreOffice either. *goes to look up info*
I think if nothing else, this whole excursion is convincing me that there simply IS no single standard for word processing in the modern world; I'm just going to have to pick one and deal with it, but as long as I pick something fairly standard, I shouldn't have too much trouble finding programs to open or convert the files for the foreseeable future.
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I don't quite want to say "you can't go wrong with rtf" because if I say it something horrible will happen, but I might think about saying something along those lines.