3/4/2023 0 Comments Plain text editor.![]() ![]() I can use anything to write: Notepad++, WordPad, Emacs, or even Microsoft Word. There are a lot of advantages of using a text-based format. I wrote a series of programs to convert Creole to other formats for me but otherwise, it has worked out for the last few years for me. I picked Creole but if I was making that decision today, I would have gone with Markdown. Plus, I'd stop obsessing about formatting when I should be doing something like writing. I could browse the history and see exactly what changed. It was text and would play well with source control (I was now dating Git rather heavy at this point). Why use OOO? There was a resurgence of structured text formatting, such as Markdown, Creole, Structured Text, ASCIIDoc, etc. And each one had "useful" comments like “working on chapter 4” because I just hit up arrow/return to save at stopping points. The repositories grew rather quickly since I check in a few times an hour. A three line fix took as much space as rewriting the chapter. Because of the zip file, Subversion (and later Git) could only tell me it changed not where it changed. ODT files were great for formatting, but they were terrible for source control. ![]() Problems came in after the initial honeymoon period. I already used CVS and Subversion at work, so why not use the source control to save my files without changing the names? A perfect idea and a few days later, I was moved over to Subversion. Copied file versioning (“file a.odt”, “file b.odt”, “file b2.odt”, “file b2-giant lizard.doc”, etc) worked on a small scale, but for the projects that took a year, it was getting pretty painful to keep track of things. ![]() sxw/.odt file as a zip file and extract the creamy XML inside.ĭuring this entire evolution of writing, I encountered another influential force that would dominate my life: source control. And, when OOO corrupted, all I had to do was crack open the. I created the PDFs from OOO and therefore whenever I changed formatting or style (bi-monthly unfortunately), I had to reformat a few hundred files. The only complain I had with OOO was formatting. Eventually, I settled on and she treated me well for a long number of years. Over the next few years, I bounced from format to format, trying to find something that fit perfectly with my growing collection of stories and also worked on the platforms of my choice (Windows, Mac, and Linux). I really didn't like the stress of losing my files and one corruption was painful. During the process, I realized that calculus really wasn't that fun and set it aside, but it got me to thinking. I did recover most of the document eventually, using the classic method of typing it all out again from hardcopy. Even paying money on various recovery websites didn't crack open the now worthless pile of bits sitting on my D drive. I had a whole range of tools to recover the data, but in this situation, none of them worked. When I wasn't working on my RPG during working hours, I was writing 400-500 page documents and watching them occasionally implode on themselves, usually about ten minutes before they were due. Now, a corrupted Word file isn't that rare of an occurrence. Everything was going just fine until one day I went to add some custom rules on creating people out of gold and cats when the most horrible of events befell me: I couldn't scroll past page thirty. Three hundred pages of (supposedly) flawless writing and enough tables to built a house. I had everything carefully ensconced in a Microsoft Word document. It was going to be the best role-playing game in the world, one that used proper object-oriented concepts and only required a bit of calculus to play. (I'm not telling people how to write, but I thought there would be interesting for my reasons to use plain text files for writing.)Ī long time ago, probably a decade or so ago, I was writing my magnum opus (of the week). ![]()
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