Tools for Writers - The Word Processing Edition

Good afternoon everyone, sorry for not posting yesterday, I'm still trying to get comfortable with my new school schedule. In my last post, we talked about text editors and how versatile they are. In terms of this course though, you'll be using a word processor. I love trying new software, seeing how different developers decided to handle my problems as a writer. We are mostly focusing on free apps, but I want to talk about a couple commercial products, so that's where we'll start.

Commercial products

Microsoft Office: You currently have two options for Microsoft Office, Office 2007 or the beta version of Office 2010. What is a beta? A beta is a public software test. Beta software is usually free to use, so if you really like MS Office. There is an upside and a downside to beta software. The good news is that you get to test drive some very expensive software, you'll have an opportunity to see if you like it, and because the company will ask you about what you like and what you don't, you have a chance to make it into a better product. The downside is that beta software is buggy. It crashes, it'll eat your work, or maybe just do strange things to it. If you're interested in the beta you can find it on the Office Online Homepage

Being a student is awesome. No really, everybody wants to sell you something and they often offer you truly absurd discounts. Microsoft does this with MS Office 2007. This is what we use in the classroom, and if you like it, then this is a great thing for you. You can get it for just $59.99 at Microsoft's Student promotion page compare that to the list price of almost $700.00.

This offer can also be found on your MySPC page under student discounts. While certain terms apply, usually the big one for any software purchase is that you have a student email address. So make sure yours is set up.

One thing that is great about MS Word is that it is well suited to doing MLA formatted papers, which we will be doing for class. It has a template for the paper itself and a tool for formatting citations in MLA format. You'll hear this in class when we do our section on MLA but it bears repeating. Don't trust that Word is going to format your citation correctly. Check it and double check it. I'm not putting the onus on Word here, yes I'm a Mac user, but I feel Office is a pretty good product even though it doesn't meet my needs. This goes for any software - whether we're talking about Word or something web based like this.

I think one of the biggest problems that office suites, whether we're talking about Microsoft's product or Open Office.org is that they try to be all things to all people. That's great if you need an application that combines text, graphs and presentation software in one package because you use those things together in your job. But it also adds another layer of complication that you may not need.

A reminder about using Word in class. SPC uses Deep Freeze. That means every night, the machine resets and if you save a document to your computer at school, your work just got deleted. Some classes don't use Deep Freeze, but I would err on the side of caution and expect that they do unless the instructor specifically says otherwise. Even then, backing up your work in a lot of places is a good thing. Put it on your thumb drive, email it to yourself, save it in ANGEL's file storage area. It only takes a few minutes to do that, and if you do it this way your work is safe and available to you from any computer.

iWork: Apple's Office suite. I used this in Comp I for my MLA formatted papers and it did a pretty good job, though if I had to print the paper I had to send it to Word and Word sometimes did odd things to the formatting. You can get a trial of this, which is what I did for Comp I. If you want to own it, you can get it for $40.00 as a student, the list is $80.00. Apple's store page on iWork is here, and you can get to the education store through your MySPC page. iWork is OS X only. I think it is a very good package, when I used it for my papers it was easy to work with the template they provided, and generally easier than Microsoft's version in Word. It did not have the citation tool, but that's not really something that interests me.

I hate spending all this time on OS X software when there are what, three of us Mac users in class including the instructor? But I really want to talk for a moment about something I've used everyday in class since I've started back to school. It was some of the best money I've spent on software since I moved over to OS X.

Circus Ponies Notebook: This is my go to software for note taking, both in class and in real life. Yes, you still have to take notes when you're all grown up. Sorry about that. First, a notebook is something that just about everybody gets, it's a physical artifact that we're all familiar with. The nice thing about notebook is how flexible it is. You can do note taking in pretty much any manner you choose. You can link to sources, include photos, graphs, tables and most anything you could possibly need. I suspect you could do an MLA paper in notebook, though I haven't tried it - I might this term, and if I do, I'll let you know how it works out. As I said, this software is OS X only. You can get it as a download from Circus Ponies and they offer both a trial and a student discount.

Free Software

So that's it for the paid apps. Let's look at the free stuff.

Google Docs: I love Google Docs. I'll admit, I'm a bit of a Google fan boy. Google Docs does word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. So think of it as an on the web version of MS Office, with some of the cruft swept away. Docs has a lot of advantages because it doesn't live on your computer, it lives on the internet. First, you can access your docs from any internet connected computer. In addition to being able to type up documents, you can also store documents you've already done and access them on the web. Of course, you can download them in a variety of formats and put the document on whatever computer you happen to be using. This is great if you have a desktop, laptop and a machine you use at school. You can also share them with other people, and let them edit the document or restrict them to viewing it. Multiple people can edit a document at the same time. Obviously, there's potential for abuse here, so I want to be clear - every student needs to do their own work, I'm not suggesting collaboration as a feature in that sense. But there are legitimate uses for this feature.

For instance, one great thing to do with a paper is after you've been through it yourself several times and you're absolutely convinced it is perfect, is to show it to somebody who isn't afraid to bruise your pride a little bit. Because I guarantee you that no matter how good you think it is, there are at least a dozen things you need to correct. Then show it to a few more people. Incidentally, that's why I ask people to comment on this blog. I want to make it better. So please do. The silence is unnerving. So using docs you can share this document with someone you know, even if they're halfway around the world and let them read it. If you let them edit it, they can highlight the parts they feel need changes and comment on why you ought to do that.

It's great for group projects. One problem I have with ANGEL at SPC is that it does not allow collaboration. So what typically happens in a group project is this: you have three or four people and one guy doing the typing or writing. This guy is the one who typically does the lion's share of the work. It shouldn't be this way, everyone should contribute more or less equally. If everybody types, and you can see who typed (or deleted, edited, highlighted what) you don't have to even consider this as a problem. You know who was working and who was slacking. That's a great feature, and one of many that ANGEL should have but doesn't.

Which brings me to another cool word processing trick that can help you when you're doing a paper, whether alone or as part of a group. Revisions. Most word processors track revisions, which are a record of changes to a document. Word can do this. iWork does, and so does Google docs. The nice thing with docs is that you can see who made the changes, as I said above. This allows you to play around with a different wording, or seeing what your paper would look like without this or that paragraph before you make a final decision to keep or cut it.

You can also publish a document to the web. It is indexed by Google and it will come up in a search. This is neat, but I can't see an immediate application for Comp 2, but I figured I would mention it.

You can also choose from a wide variety of user created templates for Docs, which is true of most word processors, but the nice thing with docs is that you aren't downloading anything. Why is that good? Anything you download is a security risk. Any file could be malware or a virus, so if you can avoid putting something on your computer, that's a good thing. Word processing templates are frequently used as a vehicle for virus delivery, so if you aren't using docs, then be cautious about where you get your templates from. Another nice feature that templates has is a rating system. You can see how useful other people found the template, which might save you some time in deciding what to use. They do have an MLA template, and I will make a point to check it out and let you know what I think.

Google docs is free and works in most web browsers, I've used it in IE 7, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Flock and Chrome for Mac. Mobile browsers are a little more troublesome, forget about Mobile IE, but Safari on the iPhone/iPod Touch works well.

Open Office.org: A free and open source product that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. There are system specific versions of it, like NeoOffice for OS X, that are designed around a particular operating system. It is an office suite containing a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet and a drawing program. I love Open Office, but I do not consider it well suited towards Comp 2. There is no MLA template, though I may look into creating one if I have time. You can get Open Office.org here

Abiword: Abiword is a word processor and nothing else. Like Open Office it is free and open source, and will work on Windows, OS X and Linux. You'll usually find this bundled in lightweight Linux distributions as the default word processor. I've never tried it, but I'll probably take it for a spin and let you know how I like if for Comp 2. You can get Abiword here.

Why do I talk at such lengths about tools? It isn't just because I'm a geek, it is about the nature of work. A student is like any other worker, your work is only going to be as good as the tools you use to produce it. That doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of money, but you do need to select tools that are appropriate to the job you need to do and that you are comfortable using.

In future installments of this series the tools are going to be a bit more "one off" than what I've talked about so far. Things like scheduling, notebooks (made of dead trees), pencils and pens. Things like that. I hope you'll find it useful and will take a moment to comment. Thank you!

Fifteen Minutes and A Cautionary Employment Fable

Confession time. I'm a serial job hopper. Up until the naughts, I never held a position for more than two years. On the other hand, I was never out of work very long either - typically it was a couple of weeks, tops. I don't really consider being a job hopper a bad thing. I find myself easily bored and I've often found the cultures of the companies I've worked for to be very weird. Jobs are okay to do for a while, like a vacation in another country, but not necessarily someplace you'd care to settle down.

Today's cautionary fable has to do with the massive power that Information Technology workers have, and why you should always treat them with a great deal of respect. Incidentally, if you're an IT major and are reading this post, please bear in mind that this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek - I have the greatest respect for your profession, even if it isn't my cup of meat.

There was this company I did telephone customer service for at the end of the nineties. Our office contained customer service and data entry workers. We were basically at the top of our professional ladders for the area. Nobody paid more for those jobs, or gave better benefits. On the other end of the office and at the opposite extreme were the graphic artists. They were at the bottom of their career ladder. Just about everyplace they could reasonably go would pay them more. This was just a notch on their resume and as a result of this, their side of the room was considerably more free wheeling and took most office rules as suggestions, perhaps even challenges as to how much they could get away with. On our side, better not be even a hint out of dress code and dot your "i"s and cross your "t"s.

Now in this job, we had an ancient, creaking IBM AS400 main frame as the heart of our computer network. Despite the fact that every worker in office had a newer-than-tomorrow Pentium four with gigantic nineteen inch Sony Trinatron monitors, we had to log into this dinosaur every shift and use it for our work. Even the artists used it to view order details, though they did the actual art in Adobe Illustrator. The AS400 runs an odd operating system, it isn't Unix or anything like it and it has this interesting feature called "screen transfer."

What screen transfer did was send a rather blurry picture of your screen, which was pretty much useless for anything as you couldn't read the screen that was being sent, and a short message to another computer on the network. You could do a screen transfer to any machine in the office that was logged on. Think of it as an intranet version of Twitter way before Twitter was a gleam in some developer's eye. Now obviously this was pretty useless for customer service work, though that seems to be its intended purpose. My night shift customer service crew had a more interesting usage. Wait until another rep is in the middle of a call and then send them a weird, funny, odd or gross message and see if you can get them to lose it in the middle of the call. It was a lot of fun. Of course any usage of this system at all was pretty much a "no-no" but it was never blocked by IT. But they could and did monitor it.

One day shift artist supervisor found another more nefarious use for the screen transfer program. The supervisor in question was very slick, oily, he fit the stereotype that most people think of when they say the word "politician." His hair was bullet-proof. He had a very Nice-with-a-capital-"N" wife - I mean that in the sense that she considered housewives from 1950s sitcoms as her role models and a brand new baby at the time of this story. He would parade them around company events as if they were trophies. I suspect that is how he thought of them.

At the same time he was carrying on with one of his artists. It would be incorrect to say that our office culture thrived on gossip. It was more like an office-wide religion, that everyone subscribed to but did not talk about explicitly. However, the gossip net was completely unaware of these events, that went on for at least six months, until they were over. This is because all of their salacious chatting at work was done via screen transfer. But IT knew, and I suspect they knew long before they mentioned it to management.

The boom came down swiftly and without warning. The head of Human Resources was waiting by his desk with a cardboard box. This was one of the most intimidating men I've ever known. He is one of only two people I've known to whom I would apply the adjective "sinister." He was an older man slight of build, and if you knew him outside of work and perhaps viewed him from a distance, you might not give him a second thought. But he projected an aura of menace, and to face him across a desk felt like a meeting with death itself. He calmly collected the supervisor's badge, and carefully watched him collect his personal belongings. After that the art room supervisor walked out of the building and, into office legend.

Moral of the story: Be nice to your IT crew. It could very well save your job. Also, don't play around on your spouse but that should really go without saying.

What started me thinking of all this is my hobby. I'm something of an armchair anthropologist. I suspect that as an anthropologist, I'm a pretty good web developer but I love watching the cultural interactions of different career fields and work environments.

Last night I had my first local area network concepts class, and for the most part it is full of people who are looking at a career in IT, but it's also an elective for my web development certificate. It got me thinking about the different tribes in the technology industry.

IT people really tend to stand apart. They tend to be very conservative - and I mean that in a non-political sense, though in a field known to stray vaguely left I think they tend to be the most conservative politically as well. They are often somewhat dour, almost like a nineteenth century banker - I've listened to people in my own field and others enthuse about some new gee-gaw, gizmo or bit of code. If there is an IT professional in our party their response to this is invariably that this thing will break the network, suck up too much bandwidth, or otherwise bring on the End of Life as We Know It. They almost seem like the grandmother figures of the tech industry, who regard certain artifacts as "too good to use," much as many grandmothers consider a given set of china or a couch.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It is simply what I've observed. I suspect that this tendency may well be a net benefit, providing a balance to the other sectors of the tech industries Panglossian optimism. It is certainly what I observed last night. In the course of going over the first chapter in our text, we discussed Twitter and social media in general. Which the class seemed to revile unanimously. I suspect that Twitter doesn't have enough of a focus for them, they really haven't sussed what it is good for, and because of that treat it as suspect. Social media in general is still too new for most IT people to consider as a worthwhile idea. I recall that when I first started using the internet, back when the web was still in swaddling clothes and web sites with graphics were a mutant oddity, like a three headed dog, that many IT people had similar feelings towards the web. I will now vigorously shake my cane at you.

One of their chief criticisms of Twitter specifically was that nobody would care if they talked about their day-to-day minutiae. I disagree, and I believe this stance lacks imagination. I think that if you could scrape a social site like Twitter and had enough computing power available, you could create a very interesting and accurate picture of its average user. Which is good for figuring out people in general, I suspect that's a worthwhile endeavor and probably a very profitable one if you work in a field like marketing.

While I'm not very good with people, I do find them endlessly fascinating. I think the "boring details" that these guys complain about are pretty interesting, and that if you watch closely enough, you'll find things that even those people in my class would find interesting. But if you don't pay attention, you'll miss all the interesting details. I guess that would be the meta-moral of this post.

Tools for Writers

In this series of articles, I'll be looking at tools for writers. This article covers software both on your computer and in the cloud that can help make you a better writer. Unless otherwise indicated, everything I talk about today is free software. I'm a multi-platform kind of guy (as everyone should be), so I'll be covering tools for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

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.

My Library and an Introduction of Sorts

Hello! Welcome to my Composition Two class blog. Keeping this journal is my extra credit assignment and I'll try to stay pretty regular with it. How about some introductions? I'm Chris Demmons, I'm a human being (citation needed), a student at SPC, a geek, and a bit of a writer. I am currently working on my web development certificate and my associates degree concurrently, which may well qualify me as crazy.

To start with, I want to talk about some of the things I enjoyed in Comp One. Then I'll talk about my library, some of the things I've written over the years. There will be some rambling, a really dumb disclaimer and perhaps some cake.

I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed Comp One, I had it and an online C++ programming during the summer term of 2009. I very much expected my programming class to be the main attraction, but really it was kind of dull. I felt we went over the basics far too frequently "This is a variable, this is an array, etc" - this is all stuff that everyone should have learned in the one thousand level class.

Composition One was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the quote based free writes though I think I could pick better quotes to write about. We also did a sensational piece based on A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. I think everyone but my partners felt like backing away a couple of feet from me after we wrote that one. Our modest proposal was an essay about potential solutions to a rising wave of senior citizen violence, using the strategies aimed at young people as a model. At the time, there were a number of cases of shocking criminal behavior in the news where the perpetrators were older than fifty-five years old. I think the most difficult piece was the first assignment, because I had fallen out of the habit of writing. It really is a skill, and if you do stop doing it, you will lose it.

I really enjoy reading, I have a huge library and a trip to bookstore is as much of a bank account killing endeavor for me as a trip to the local EBstop. Truthfully, I don't think video games and books are very far removed from one another - but I'll save that for a later post. I have a love-hate relationship with my local library. I love the fact they exist. I hate the fact that they never have, or have very limited stock of the books I want. But seriously, support your local library. Speaking of which, I love science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries in terms of fiction. In nonfiction I read a lot of things related to technology - programming manuals mostly, self-improvement, history, and current event related titles. You can see my aNobii bookshelf here, it's only a fraction of what I own, but hopefully this will motivate me to catalog and review the rest of my collection. That collection is just one shelf, I probably own ten shelves worth of books easy. I also spend far too much time reading things on the web, and I'll share those with you soon.

I've spent a lot of time writing, mostly as a hobby, but one fool actually paid me cold hard cash to put words to paper. But let's get a little context first. I started out writing as a kid, just because I wanted to be like my heroes. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty and a few others that I can't recall. I wrote for my school paper in High School from tenth grade until graduation. I really loved journalism class, even though I had a pretty difficult time getting my articles to see print. I was probably the most censored journalist in my high school, though my collaborator during that time can claim almost as many red marks from the administration. Our advisor loved us and was completely amazingly great, though. Mostly we wrote humor and table-top role playing game pieces. I occasionally produced some science fiction back then too. I wrote a few things for a student run literary magazine - which was also censored by the school. Noticing a pattern here? After I graduated I wrote a one shot magazine. Short magazines were a really big thing back then, and I had a great time with it. I'll probably put on my rose tinted mirror shades at some point later and wheeze on about it. More recently, I've been writing a few articles using the Notes application on Facebook - mostly directed at friends and family, but I might post a few here as well.

Lastly, I may spend a little time talking about the publishing industry and intellectual property issues. This might be a little out of scope for this blog, so I'll tag each piece with these words ("publishing", "intellectual property") but I believe that both are highly relavent. When I talk about that, I'll be discussing how books are published now, the crisis facing the industry, some of the changes brought on by the internet, and how authors should be paid.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I will. Obviously everything on this blog is not representative of Saint Petersburg College (SPC), my instructor, or any other person connected with that institution. These are my opinions, and they are to be used for entertainment or annoyance only. So if you're looking to dice a potato, you've come to the wrong blog. With that said, I'm looking forward to class and hope you enjoy my work!