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The Writing Machine

Blogging about the best articles, sites, and blog posts for Writers; on the Craft, Mind and Body, Tech, Tools, and all the other Paraphenalia.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

(Editing and) "Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation"

Here's an ingenious method of marking up a digital manuscript when collaborating with others, even though the contributors may be using wildly varying text editors or word processors. From Humanized via 43 Folders Recent Links --> "Collaboration Made Simple with Bracket Notation". This would also work just fine for editing your own work alone.

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I have so much stuff saved in .doc .txt .rtf .sxw .knt and other formats. I tried in the recent past to simplify things by sticking to one filetype where possible (.rtf), but switching to mac complicated things again because .rtf's with pictures are changed to .rtfd's in osx. grrr. So, I'm moving towards just working in .html, motivated by the way ScrapBook in Firefox has become indispensible to me for research and note-taking. Html can be read in a text editor, and I'm getting to a point where it makes more sense than not in that format, but can also be read by Word, Open Office, TextEdit, and any email program. In fact, it'd be hard (for me) to think of a program that works with words that can't work with html.

I think, because the internet is so pervasive, and so much content is prepared for it, html is going to be supported by most writing/word processing/editor programs. And Bracket Notation will work just fine in html. Nice.

ps. I also like the suggestion made by one of the commenters to use <> brackets instead of [ ], though that may cause problems with html. Hmm. Shall investigate.

Tags: software, writing, word processing

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Writing with Mori

Infinite Loop, an Ars Technica Journal, has a "mini-review" of the Mac digital notebook software Mori. It's of interest because the reviewer writes from the perspective of, well, a writer, describing ways the program could be used in writing a novel. Mori's been on my radar screen for a while now, but after trialling an earlier version, I lost track of it while testing out all the other software candy available. I'm going to try it again soon and may post a review of my own.

Tags: software, mac, writing, blogpost, organiser, digital notebook