software, part 1: composition

In the next few posts, I'm going to gather my preliminary thoughts about the software I've mentioned so far. I use Tiger myself, so apologies to users of other OSes if this gets too Mac-specific: a Windows version of Tinderbox is nearly ready, however, and that is the single most important tool which I shall be investigating during this project anyway. I'll organise these notes working from the software that I've explored the least (composing) and end up with the one that seems likely to be the most revolutionary: Tinderbox (for 'thinking out loud'). This will take three posts, I think (in the middle one, I'll focus on an archiving and database system). I am not offering a comprehensive survey of all the good products that are out there; these are my notes on the four software packages which caught my imagination the most after a quick survey of maybe three times that number.

Copywrite and Ulysses
These are text editors designed to help writers prepare material for publication. Their designers have drawn similar conclusions about what authors need, and--perhaps more tellingly for those of us habituated to writing in what has become the 'standard' processor--what they don't need. I'll start with the latter point. I'm fully capable of wasting hours fiddling with subheadings and font sizes and indented paragraphs and other such decorative decisions. I'll admit that I have even been silly enough (once or twice, you understand) to construct sentences on the basis of how they appear on the screen (how can I avoid that block of white at the end of the line because the next word is too long to fit?; do I really want only a single word or two on a single line at the end of a paragraph?). I clearly have a severe case of WYSIWYG-itis, which brings precisely zero benefit to the work as it is printed, for it's always completely altered by the typesetting process. In these two programmes, I have to go cold turkey on the design front. I'm there to write; to construct ideas as elegantly as I can. How all of this looks on the page is not my proper concern, and, of course, that is entirely right. It has been liberating not to engage with all of those formatting matters on a visual level, which the programmes simply don't display in any depth. Both environments also feature 'full screen' modes, where it's you and your ideas: no toolbars, no dialogue boxes, no distractions. Unsettling to start with, for me at least, but this is now my strong preference for my working space.

The biggest advantages that these programmes offer over Microsoft Word and those influenced by it are are found in the structuring solutions that they feature. Rather than providing you with a single page at a time, CopyWrite and Ulysses both offer a central space (the single page equivalent) with additional panes for notes and comments that you expand, contract, dismiss, or add to as the need arises. My writing plans and/or my review comments are clearly in view alongside whichever section of prose I'm working on that moment.

Next, filing: using a three-pane window as the default set-up (think Outlook or Mail), you are encouraged to think of your writing as a project to be worked on chunk-by-(more or less substantial)-chunk. Each section of prose (introduction; method; literature review; main points; appendices; bibliography; whatever you like) deserves its own folder. Moving between these is a synch. Elsewhere, there's a pane which lists the files held in the open folder, named as you like and with easily read 'draft' or 'version' tags to show you your most up-to-date attempt. The single biggest pane (all of this is tweak-able, of course) holds your writing space. As the Ulysses project managers put it: "No extensive text is written at once, in a single document. A story consisting of 200 pages results from fractions, starting points, discarded ideas and many more--all neatly distributed along a total of 800 pages, most likely with over 100 different documents, combined with notes, Post-Its, scribblings on the margins of numerous daily papers, beer covers, napkins and the back sides of photos." These two working spaces manage that sort of real-life research and writing process very well.

Personally, I find this system wonderful (it's similar in both programmes). Like a good host at a potentially imposing function, these interfaces are so discrete that you quickly forget that you are being looked after extremely well and you are freed up to get on with the business of enjoying yourself.

Auto-archive and backup features are comprehensive in both programmes: not only are potential slips of the 'close-without-saving' type harder to make, but you are expected to want to keep old copies of early drafts alongside whatever you currently think is the most successful version of that section. This has been very helpful.

Now, I know I could get a Word-style programme to work in similar ways--or, rather, I could work around what these offer by default to achieve a similar working environment--but why bother? I'm happier using a programme that has been built from scratch to offer these features.

Export: this is the one potential snag. The dot doc file format has become dominant in the workplace (in my experience, at least), and only MS programmes can manage it 100% reliably. These programmes help you to get your article or book out of your head and down on the page very successfully, but printing these out or saving them in a format that pretty much anyone can read requires that you take a couple of unfamiliar steps. First of all, you have to organise all of your chunks into the finalised sequence. This is no more complicated than doing some filing, but in reverse. My introduction comprises of v 3 of that section, v 8 of the part about method &c. It's not difficult, it's just not how I used to work, which was much more linear, never moving on to a new section until the one before it was 85% right (and never holding more than one version at a time).

CopyWrite uses the dot txt format, which is easily readable by most software out there so you can open it, edit it, print it out, save it as you need to. Thinking of emailing speed or space on your HDD? Txt files are around a fifth of the size of their doc equivalent. Ulysses offers something similar when you want to talk with the outside world (including the dot txt format), and something beyond that which is rather more complicated than I've got to grips with yet, whereby you can take your (plain) text and then code layout features (this is a quotation and should be indented; that is a subheading and so the font should be bold and 14 point) before exporting (to LaTeX and via that as a PDF).

Both developers offer demo versions and have good, comprehensive websites. I've not yet settled on which I'll buy for myself: because they are really quite similar it'll probably come down to money, in which case CopyWrite will win. Ulysses's interface is a bit classier, but not *that* much classier.