Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Why do artists have their own software companies?

Author:Nick Sweeney
Posted:4/20/2000; 1:25:53 PM
Topic:Why do artists have their own software companies?
Msg #:16461 (In response to 16449)
Prev/Next:16460 / 16462

Hear hear. I dumped MS Word after writing my masters' thesis, primarily because it was incapable of putting footnotes on the same page as their references. Which, if you're writing long academic pieces, is enough to make you scream. Many of my friends actively resent having to use Microsoft Office to do their writing, but it's getting to the point where it's imposed upon them by publishers and journals, especially in the humanities. (And remember that the legal profession generally prefers to work in the WordPerfect format.)

Generally, what writers want most of all is a tool which does as little as possible to obstruct the work they're doing. Which is why you'll find a lot of novelists who still write longhand, use a manual typewriter, or stick with the monochrome Amstrad PCW wordprocessor that they bought in 1985. Writers aren't bleeding-edge, in general, but they are creatures of habit. A stable UI, a decent spell-checker and a reliable word-count and search facility will normally count more than any number of animated assistants. Which is perhaps why they tend not to create tools unless there's no alternative: Knuth formulated TeX simply because he was frustrated with the standard of contemporary mathematical typesetting.

I use Emacs now for most of my writing, and for all of my academic work, which gets formatted with LaTeX. The learning curve is steep, but the benefits are huge. Other, less geeky friends are happy to use Wordstar or WP5.1 for DOS. But the ability to abstract form from content -- to stop worrying about fonts and spacing and tabs until the piece is finished -- is at the heart of the writer's quest for that perfect connection between mind, hand and screen. There are a few great pieces on this, written from a writerly perspective:

http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html http://www.byte.com/art/9707/sec13/art2.htm http://www.ifi.uio.no/~paalso/artikler/styles/new-version/pap.html

In the last paper, read XML for SGML and see why I come to this site...

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