Process Words or Edit Text?20 October 2003 One of my alert readers forwarded me to an article on Slashdot about using text editors for writing rather than word processors. I've actually gone back and forth on this myself, so I thought I'd explore the issue here. I've tried just about every word processor and text editor available for both the Palm and Pocket PC. I started using Palms for writing in 1997 after writing my first novel longhand in a DayTimer, and back then even Memo Pad was a revelation. When QED hit the market and allowed me to break the 4k barrier, I was in heaven. In the six years since I've written in SmartDoc/QuickWord, pedit, TakeNote, WordSmith, Documents To Go, Pocket Word, Notepad, TextMaker, and a few others. Some of these provide simple text editing, some nearly WYSIWYG word processing. And after all that, which is better? Well, it depends. For first drafts, I want a fast text editor with as few distractions as possible. I don't want to be distracted by font choices, alignments, and other formatting choices. I want as little as possible between me and getting words down on the page. In the first draft stage, I don't even care about features like sophisticated find and replace, although word count is a must. Now that Memos on the new Tungstens can handle up to 32k of text, I could use those for writing short stuff (well, almost, see below). Once the first draft is done, then it's time to tinker a bit. In this stage I want to have access to find and replace tools, easy ways to cut and paste large blocks of text, and spell checking. Most of this can still be done by text editors like pedit, especially if a third party spell check program is added to the mix. Finally, once the words are all down and in the proper sequence, it's time to pretty it up for publication. At this stage, I have to have a real word processor, something that can handle fonts, alignments, spacing and headings. It's imperative not to get bogged down in this sort of minutiae during the actual writing, but for most folks outside the Slashdot crowd, proper formatting does tend to help readability. So. I need a fast text editor with few distractions, a good spell checker and revision tool and a full-featured word processor for presentation formatting. How many tools is that? One, if it's the right tool. On my Tungsten E, I use Documents To Go 6 for all the above. The user interface is clean and sparse (something that always bugged me about TextMaker on the Pocket PC; the UI was just too busy) and stays out of my way during first drafts. A quick tap of the "Enable Font Viewing" checkbox in Documents To Go's Preferences screen turns off the WYSIWYG fonts, so I can type fast in the default system font without being constantly reminded of relative font sizes and styles. About the only thing I do presentation-wise in the first draft is set the paragraph spacing to 12pt bottom spacing so I can type in "open" or block paragraph style without having to hit Enter twice between paragraphs. (This makes it easier to change to indented paragraphs later if necessary.) Other than that small nod to presentation, I use Documents To Go for first drafts much as if it were a straight text editor like pedit. Once the first draft is done (and I've satisfied or not overrun the target word count), I keep font display off but start spell checking, removing adverbs where possible, moving sentences or sometimes whole paragraphs around to improve clarity. Thankfully Documents To Go supports a PalmOS feature I worked for years without knowing about (finally clued into me by Mike Cane; where are you, Mike?). If you tap and drag over a text field in PalmOS, the system selects text by the character. If you double-tap to select a word and then drag, the system automatically selects whole words at a time. If you triple-tap to select a whole line/paragraph, you select whole paragraphs at a time when you drag. This is wonderful for moving around larger blocks of text, and much more precise for stylus-driven editing than the Pocket PC. Finally, when all the words are where I want them, I turn on font viewing and set the presentation of the documents. Here I add bold and italics where needed, set paragraph alignments and adjust spacing if necessary. Thanks to Documents To Go's ability to both edit native Microsoft Word .DOC files and attach them to VersaMail emails, the end result is a properly formatted document that can be emailed for submission directly from my Palm. Most of the posters commenting on the Slashdot article grudgingly accepted the idea of needing formatting prior to submission, but they were fine with doing that on the desktop before email. I'd rather have the tools to do the whole thing mobile, if necessary. TextMaker is in development for the Palm, and regular readers know I'll try it out when it's released. I know it can handle the presentation end of the cycle. But if TextMaker's going to unseat Documents To Go as my default writing tool, it's going to have be better than Documents To Go at staying out of my way during first drafts, too. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |