The race to reinvent document editing

[ThatNerd]

Misunderstanding on my part, then, your original comment was set as a reply to my post and I thought you were addressing my comments only.

[karlnyhus]

My mistake

(twenty characters)

[webwalrus]

@NiranS

Document creation and document editing should be two different beasts.

Depends on the document. Sometimes things like page boundaries put constraints on the content therein. And sometimes layout considerations actually change the content itself.

If a document is never going to be printed or turned into something that has to obey particular dimensions, I agree - that’s a whole different use case from a document whose ultimate destination is a piece of paper.

@NiranS

Why does writing have to occur sequentially?,Can a document be created or read in an ad hoc manner(tags, links, searches), where pertinent sections appear as needed (like a create your own adventure).Perhaps now I am conflating note taking(Zettelkasten, LYT )and

Writing doesn’t have to occur sequentially, but reading - in many cases - needs to proceed in a linear manner. The writer should organize things in such a way as to help the reader comprehend, and the reader should theoretically derive the maximum benefit from proceeding in order.

You have no idea how many things I’ve written clear instructions for, somebody skips half of them, and then complains that something didn’t work.

@JohnAtl

Hypertext, to me, is kind of like being given someone’s Obsidian vault and saying, “Here, there’s a story here, knock yourself out.”

Exactly. That’s the thing about a Zettelkasten or similar - it’s what’s relevant to the individual person. What’s useful to John may not be useful to me at all, and my brain may not even draw the same connections.

Anybody who’s spent time in education (formal or otherwise) will appreciate the number of different techniques that can be required to get a group of peoples’ brains on the same page.

[wvu_mtneer]

As one of those boring lawyers who has to use Microsoft Word, I’ve found that Ulysses export styles work great. I tend to write in Ulysses and export to Word. I don’t have to do much tinkering afterwards to finish it. I wrote my last appellate brief entirely in Ulysses. The only thing I really had to do after exporting to Word was add citations for my table of authorities.

[nationalinterest]

I’ve found the same. I use Ulysses for sermon writing. I can export to both Word and PDF for different purposes (I use a large font with multiple colours (e.g. bold is in red) for preaching from my iPad, a smaller font for the few pages that need to be printed). Its ease of styling of output is impressive and the most flexible/easy of the alternatives I’ve tried, especially being able to export one source to more than one format and break the document into ‘chapters’.

For essays/research papers I still use Word because its integration with Zotero makes it easy to cite and I can’t ‘lose’ original sources along the way. I store paper highlights in Devonthink/Markdown. I find Word formatting can be a pain and I look forward to dumping Word when I don’t need to reference so much!

[Nevyn]

Markdown was created by Aaron Swartz (RIP) and John Gruber.
Let’s not forget Aaron’s contribution.

[jcarucci]

I didn’t know that, thanks for pointing it out.