New treats tempt Bardelys to new explorations of software with which to keep track of himself.
Ah! JreePad! Bardelys thought, seeing a new version, with new features!
The wonderful thing was, that it had gone beyond Hank Hagedorn’s original TreePad in allowing ‘html nodes.’ These were in code, either html or a variant on the plain-text markup ‘Textile,’ and could be edited as raw text, or else viewed as formatted.
This intrigued Bardelys no end. It just might be what he was looking for. It also allowed for wikified ‘CamelCase’ word links, that would create like-named nodes on the fly. Unfortunately, it did not seem to have the capability to track back to its referents, which would have given Bardelys a way to get around tagging.
Bardelys liked Textile, ‘humane markup.’ He liked its markup of block levels. Often the plain text markup schemes required beginning and ending markup, which made search-and-replace transformations a bit trickier (it called for regular expressions, at which Bardelys was no whiz).
There was one significant drawback to JreePad and Textile, and that was on the Mac at least (and Bardelys presumed on Win32 and Linux and the Java .jar file too), JreePad implemented only some of Textile’s markup. Even the User Manual that came with JreePad showed that, and it was curious that a developer would show that his code didn’t work, and not even make some such comment as, ‘These aren’t implemented yet.’ However, one nice bit about the Textile written nodes, was that exporting them to html transformed them to xhtml, and smartened the quotations, and put in entities for em- and en-dashes. Very nice indeed.
Then, OpenOffice.org. Bardelys had been intrigued enough to check out the latest beta of the 3.0 code. He found the new way comments were handled to be a vast improvement. There was no way to tag different items, as far as he could see, and the Navigator pane still didn’t allow the user to collapse some branches of the tree while leaving others at the same level open. This meant that in a document of enough headings, the Navigator listed them all, and the list was too long to fit in the panel, making it much more onerous to move sections about. And the Master Document Navigator pane only showed the documents if the user wished to rearrange them; this was a flat, single-depth list.
OpenOffice.org had other nice features, though. User-defined dictionaries, and autocomplete functions, and automatic capitalization of sentences, as well as smart quotes. (The chief difficulty in such bells and whistles, in Bardelys’ opinion, was their seductiveness: after using them, he found he relied on them, and quickly slipped into the laziest sort of keyboardist.)
LyX, ah, LyX! Here was a puzzle, a long-term flirtation with no resolution as yet. It was nice to WYSIWYM, and see things nicely laid out. The new table of contents navigation pane could be opened or collapsed at any branch. LyX had TeX-style ‘smart quotes’ which were not curly. But LyX also allowed its files to be maintained in compressed form, saving a great deal of disk space for long files; it allowed Bardelys to make multi-part documents, with the Mother Doc referring to the Baby Docs.
Ah, but…
What was the problem with LyX? Bardelys had taken it up and toyed with it, idly, and never worked up enough interest or enthusiasm to put it to use in a real project, the only way to get through the initial awkwardness of any powerful and complex application. And so ever coy, he flirted and left her panting.
He must look on.
One thing he had determined: for his writer’s logs, that included word counts and tallies, there was nothing to match a spreadsheet and the awe-inspiring feeling of seeing the totals change ‘automagically.’ So that was that.
The blog postings, that were so numerous, could only properly be done on Scrivener, so he was trapped that way, uni-platfomationally as it were.
For the news items, and the farm journal, he would look on.
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 30, 2008)
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