Let's say that I have an article, I need this article to be published in a magazine, on my blog, on my website, and I'm going to turn it into an ePub file for eReaders - oh yeah, I'll also need a few hard copies on dead trees too. What tool should I use?
Plain text. Plain text is also known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text. Unlike most things you'll hear technical folks gush over, this standard is as old as the hills. It first saw commercial use in 1963, and ASCII support was a requirement for all computers purchased by the U.S. federal government in 1968.
So what's so great about plain text and how can it help you? In a word: portability. Plain text can and does go everywhere. Between operating systems, on the web (all the hypertext markup language, cascading style sheets and javascript that forms the web pages you read are created in plain text), and it can be sent to a word processor to be converted to formatted text. Also because it is such a durable standard, it can survive the ravages of time. It would likely be very difficult to take a document written on my first computer's word processor (Speed Script on the Commodore 64) and view it on my Mac. I would have no such trouble reading a plain text document written on the same computer.
This differs from formatted text, formatted text is usually produced by a word processor such as Microsoft Word, Open Office Write, Abiword, etc but is also produced by other applications such as spreadsheets and databases. Formatted text is very flashy, but not very portable. Sure that Word file can be opened in a lot of other word processors, but try adding it to a blog or a website. Not gonna happen like Duke Nuke'em Forever. Do not talk to me about how you can make a really keen website in MS Word. I am turning away from you. I am also mocking you so hard that I am boring a hole to the center of the Earth. Additionally how confident are you that Microsoft's *.doc standard that you use today will be supported in ten years? How about twenty? I am not saying it doesn't have its uses though. I can't imagine setting up a paper for MLA using plain text (without something like xhtml anyway.) So yes, when you need the bells and whistles - exactly positioned text, non-breaking line spaces, carriage returns/line breaks, bold, italics/emphasis, and so on - that's when you'll want to turn to your word processor.
So now we get to see the wonderful toys:
Windows XP/Vista/Seven
- Notepad. It comes on every windows box and though it has a very plain brown wrapper look about it, it is unquestionably the most useful program that comes on your system out of the box.
- Notepad++. This a much more full featured version of Notepad. It has a lot of nifty bells and whistles. It is free and open source (free is free as in beer, open source means the program's code is available for modification from the author - you can find out more about open source software here.)
Before I start on Mac OS and Linux, a word about what I will not be covering here. I won't be talking about Emacs or Vi. If you know what those are, you probably don't need any help from me. Also, I prefer to keep all of my limbs relatively functional. The debates over the merits of these two text editors are a considerably more religious issue than the usual My-OS-Is-Better-Than-Yours arguments.
Mac OS X
TextEdit. Comes with every Mac, but is the polar opposite of notepad. Don't use this. It sucks. I don't say that about a lot of Apple software. It has an identity crisis. It doesn't know whether it should be a mediocre text editor or a mediocre word processor and ends up being terrible at both. Take it off your dock and forget that it exists.
Smultron. This is no longer being actively developed, but is a great free and open source text editor for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. There is a 10.6 Snow Leopard beta available, but your mileage may vary on that one.
TextWrangler. This is my go to text editor, by Bare Bones software. It is free, but closed source. They also make a commercial product, BBEdit which has been well received. I really like TW's interface, and it's a nice light weight, hassle free program that has seen me through most of my academic career. You cannot go wrong with this.
Linux
Cream - I'm not actively using any particular linux distribution at the moment, but if I were this would probably be my go to text editor. A vim based text editor, it has everything you need. It's also available for Windows.
Putting it all together
In my example above, I'd send the plain text off to the magazine, who would likely format it for printing in Adobe InDesign, add xhtml tags so it could be uploaded to my website and blog, add xml for the ePub file and finally, copy and paste the contents of my article over to my word processor so it could be formatted for plain paper printing.
The next post in this series will cover word processors and other tools for formatted text, as with this article my focus will be on free software for all platforms. Stay tuned.
