Question Useful software

Tristra wrote: Gripes aside I do understand their desire for uniformity. On the whole, it makes sense.
but the insistence on certain things like Comic Sans style headers actually damages the polish of a work and makes it look like the writers are stuck in the 90s

Tristra wrote: the only downside I see to using Google Docs is the stringent formatting of this site, I understand why their needs to be a standard of quality. and am willing to work with the format, but do not fully agree with the approach they are taking (BIG surprise there)
It makes transferring the finished parts of a work to this site more laborious than they really need to be.

Tristra wrote:
I don't edit my things here because the embedded editor kinda stinks.
SO anytime I need to make a change I load google docs make the change export the document then come back here.
unless it is very small like adding punctuation.

that means when I am done I will in effect completely overwrite the copy on this site and have to reformat it (Before or after) then make sure it has the disclaimer tag, and make sure it has the headings it needs just for here.

if it's me doing it or it's you doing it it's still a lot of needless labor trying to maintain the system.
.

Dawnfyre wrote:

Tristra wrote: the only downside I see to using Google Docs is the stringent formatting of this site, I understand why their needs to be a standard of quality. and am willing to work with the format, but do not fully agree with the approach they are taking (BIG surprise there)
It makes transferring the finished parts of a work to this site more laborious than they really need to be.

Want another downside to Google Docs?

THEY have it on their servers and are well known for NOT respecting privacy.
( this actually goes for all cloud services, you have lost control of your files. )

Tristra wrote:
I don't edit my things here because the embedded editor kinda stinks.
SO anytime I need to make a change I load google docs make the change export the document then come back here.
unless it is very small like adding punctuation.

that means when I am done I will in effect completely overwrite the copy on this site and have to reformat it (Before or after) then make sure it has the disclaimer tag, and make sure it has the headings it needs just for here.

if it's me doing it or it's you doing it it's still a lot of needless labor trying to maintain the system.
.

export to plain text, no formatting other than tabs / spaces and line breaks
copy it in here and add the formatting.
you get a far simpler job in the editor on here.

Tristra wrote: I have built jets, computers, and robots. I have written programs for all sorts of things and animated all sorts of stuff. but no matter how much I work at it, my brain rejects the illogic of English and it is my native spoken language. so haveing to take extra steps to present an unfinished work for review so it can become finished, or get feedback from my peers is taxing and from an engineering perspective kinda dumb.

konzill wrote: The programmers solution to this would be to write the original in markdown (or your favourit plain text format) and export to other formats when necessary. Going from Markdown to minimalist HTML is really kind of easy.

git diff -U1 --color-words

Kettlekorn wrote: The default diff output can be a big impractical with prose, but there are some options that improve it, which you could alias to something short:

git diff -U1 --color-words

--color-words

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: And then there is how hard code would make reading and editing the story in the first place.

My Cool Story
=============

By Kettlekorn


Chapter 1: An Introduction
--------------------------

This is what Markdown looks like.  Whee!  It's basically plain-text, but it *can* still be emphatic.  When I want to be emphatic, I *italicize things* or even **bold them**.  But I don't do it with invisible markers or ugly tags, no.  I just put the text I want to emphasize between asterisks, as though I'm writing an email in the 90s.  Markdown is like that on purpose so that it's simple and clear to read.  I don't manually word-wrap like people used to, though, because that would be lame and this isn't *actually* the 90s... but I could, if I wanted.  Markdown groups text into a paragraph until it meets a blank line, so I could use manual breaks wherever I want and they'll just be ignored.  But that would make editing the text painful.

So, here's a new paragraph.  Yeah, I just hit the Enter key twice, no need for tags or anything.  Tags are for mark*up*, but this is Mark*down*! 


> Oh, and it can inline things too,  
> So if you have a poem,  
> You won't have to be blue.  
> Just use your brackets  
> Like nineteen ninety-two,  
> And the whole thing indents;  
> It does it all, just for you.

Though in a poem like that, you have to add two trailing spaces at the end of each line to make it preserve the newline.  Otherwise it assumes you're just manually word-wrapping like a noob and stitches it all together into a single line.  That's not a big deal unless you have your editor set to automatically remove trailing whitespace (which is *usually* undesirable when programming).  If you do that like I just did when testing this text, confusing results happen!

Chapter 2: More Exposition
--------------------------

> This chapter begins with a long inline chunk.  Since it's prose, manually line-breaking would be annoying.  Fortunately, it's unnecessary.  You just have to put the bracket at the beginning of your pretentious pre-chapter quotation, then type away.  That whole block will be wrapped in blockquote tags automatically when you run the Markdown executable to export it to HTML.

> Though if that pretension extends to multiple *paragraphs*, you'll need to put a bracket at the start of each paragraph.  No big deal.

And if your story is a bit more complicated than a normal one and includes snippets of code or terminal output (like in *Whisper*), you can do that with back-ticks.  `This text would be mono-space.`

You can make bullet lists and numbered lists too:

* Bullet points are like this
* Numbered lists work the same, but with numbers instead of asterisks
* You can make links to:  [Markdown's Wikipedia Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown)
* If you don't like how similar *italic* and **bold** look, you can use _italic_ or __bold__ instead
* I have chosen to follow this list with a horizontal rule (three dashes turn into an <hr /> tag)

---

And that's Markdown.  If I feed a file like this into the Markdown program, it takes all those ASCII headers, removes the underlines, and wraps them in proper HTML tags (h1 for the one with equal signs, and h2 for the ones with hypens).  All the asterisks go away and get replaced by em or strong tags.  Etc.  The result looks normal, not like something that began life looking akin to a README file.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: A surprising amount of the stories in this site have been through TextEdit.

I'm rather old school at cleaning up HTML, and while copy and paste is ever so simple and works into our CMS system, by god do the commercial Word Processing programs drop shitloads of crud HTML in with the basic formatting, which I'm then still to lazy to write scripts to clean up, and just do it the old fashioned way with find and replace in TextEdit.

I think Kristin does her cleanup in Dreamweaver, and I'm not sure what Dan uses.

Sir Lee wrote: yWriter6, a fairly popular freeware geared specifically for novel writing, just had a new version released:

www.spacejock.com/yWriter6_Download.html

Sir Lee wrote: If you use Jarte (a simple word processor with minimal distraction features) for writing... I have good and bad news.
First, the good: Jarte Plus, a version with a few extra features, is now free. In fact, only the "Plus" version is available for download from the official site.
Then, the bad: that happened because the company is essentially dropping the product. Support is no longer available, and no further development of the product is planned.
The lateste (last?) version available is 6.2, which is just shy of two years old.