academhack » Word Processing

LaTex-Another Word Processing Option

dave — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:49:24 +0000

Occasionally when I write about word processors someone will ask about using LaTeX (that’s LaTeX, not latex . . . totally different things). LaTex is the hardcore version of Word Processing. I most often find it used by those in the sciences as it is much easier to type equations and formulas in LaTex. (Technically speaking LaTex is not a program but a mark-up language-like HTML, there are many programs which enable you to work in LaTex.)

Unfortunately LaTeX is rather complicated for the uninitiated. Fortunately though Arjun Muralidharan at The Productive Student has written a post about how he uses LaTeX as a Word Processor. As Arjun points out there are many advantages to using something like LaTeX, where content is separate from form, allowing you to concentrate on the text, leaving the format for an afterthought. Equally as important, is the way that LaTeX allows easy import of bibliographic data.

So, if you are interested in this type of word processing check out Arjun’s point, and perhaps this free users manual.

Mellel Discount—Today Only

dave — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:48:13 +0000

Quick note to say that for those who are Mac users and looking for a Word Processor that doesn’t suck (yes MS Word I am talking about you), Maczot is selling Mellel at a discounted price. Mellel is by far my favorite word processor, a program designed specifically for the ways academics write. Normally $35 (educational discount) it is $24.50 today only. (Sorry PC folks, Mac only.)

Two Quick Useful Links

dave — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:55:10 +0000

If you want to convert a Microsoft Word document into an HTML document that makes sense, follow the suggestions on this tutorial. (I know Microsoft Word lets you do this automatically, but the HTML is produces is at best questionable, and usually horrendous.) The methods in this tutorial are much better, and worth the effort if you are converting a document to be viewable via the web.

Continuing my long rant against bad PowerPoint presentations, check out this post on the Lessig blog, about how a physicist adopted the “Lessig style” and learned how to be a far more effective communicator.

A List of Interest

dave — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:31:46 +0000

I am currently working on a longish post about using Twitter in academia, but in the meantime I have collected some useful links to peruse.

First up Big Think. Think of YouTube for ideas. The polish on this site is nice, and it seems to be off to a good start with some rather substantial names being interviewed on camera. Moby, Kurt Anderson, Jimmy Wales, Steven Pinker . . .This is probably a good resource to use as a discussion starter for your classes.
I talk a great deal here about file formats (never send me a .doc). One of the frequent questions people have, particularly those on a PC, is how to manipulate a .pdf. Tinkernut has a fabulous, short, screen tutorial on manipulating pdfs. The tools he recommends are all PC based, but you can do similar things with a Mac.
A couple of days ago Lifehacker ran a post on obscure Google tricks. There is a lot of hidden functionality built into Google of which even heavy internet users are often not aware. For example, converting currency for those overseas academic ventures, or using it to ID foreign words.
Howard Rheingold of Smart Mobs fame, is teaching a course on social media. As part of the class he has collected an extensive list of RSS resources.
Finally, for those in history, the Center for New Media and History out of George Mason University has launched a new project: Echo. Echo is an online directory for the collection of information on the history of science and technology.

Two Good Reviews

dave — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 12:06:29 +0000

Looking for a Word Processor? Zaine Ridling at Donation Coder has written a thorough review, and by thorough I mean over 15,000 words, covering various word processors. Not only does he review major and minor desktop word processors, but he also has a rundown of online ones. With each Word Processor he presents the good and the bad, and gives a sense of why you would want to choose one over the other. Equally as important the piece begins by running down some of the larger questions and issues, such as file format, that you need to think about. (The only limitation is that he covers only PC options.)

And for taking notes online . . . Web Worker Daily has a review of online note taking apps. This article covers the seven major online note taking applications. If you are looking to start using one of these, this is a good place to start.

Students-Thinking About the Fall Already?

dave — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 01:34:23 +0000

The Read Write Web, one of those top quality blogs, has a rundown on Web Applications for Students. This list is long, thorough, and sorted well. The article goes thru replacements for office, notetaking apps, mindmapping apps, useful sites for studying, and so much more. And, the best part the article starts with this:

I went to a school that utilized a Virtual Learning Environment called WebCT (since absorbed by the Blackboard company), and it really wasn’t very fun to use.

Stupid Good Trick of the Day

dave — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:10:57 +0000

One of the programs I use so frequently that I forget how useful it is, is TextExpander. There are many programs that do the same thing: RapidoWrite, TypeIt4me, or on the PC TypePilot.

Way to many uses for these types of programs to go into here, but just one example. I type many words that need accents. Sure I could go to Edit-> Special Characters-> Select the Accented vowel I need, or use the keyboard shortcuts to do this, but why? Instead I specify in Textexpander that whenever I type a word that needs an accent it gets automatically replaced.

So I type “cliche” and it is automatically turned into “cliché,” “differance” becomes “différance,” “Zampano” becomes “Zampanó” (a character in House of Leaves). This saves me so much time over the course of a paper, especially all of those with a bunch of foreign words.

Working with Pdfs (Adobe isn’t the only option)

dave — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 02:18:20 +0000

I was talking with a faculty member the other day who was complaining about being sent a .pdf, as he was unable to “edit” it in any way, he wanted the more friendly Microsoft Word document. (If you don’t know what a .pdf is click here, most of the “professional” documents you get are in this form, like journal articles.) After making the point that there is nothing friendly about Word, I asked him to explain more. And then I realized his concern. I think a lot of people assume that you cannot edit .pdfs because they use either Adobe Reader or Preview. There are in fact programs which let you edit .pdfs and this can be of significant use. Consider:

You could use such an application to take notes directly on those articles you download from JSTOR, Project Muse or other such journal databases.
Many publishers will send you proofs as a .pdf, you could make corrections directly on the proof, rather than writing a separate document.
Many sites allow you to download brochures, maps, fliers, etc. in .pdf form, this way you can make notes straight on the file.
In fact you could require your students to submit everything as a .pdf and comment directly on the papers, sending them back to the students. This would replicate the “writing in the margins effect” while keeping everything digital. One of the authors on The Unofficial Apple Weblog does this, as he outlines in this post.

What You Can Use

As the above post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog outlines there are two paid options, PdfClerk and PdfPen. I have used both, and really don’t have a preference, and this post does a good job of covering the differences, so I am not going to get into it here, but . . .

As several people have emailed (thanks especially to Curt and Ryan) there is a FREE option for Mac users, that is also open source: Skim. While it is still in beta, and not as robust as the above two it is FREE. You can read reviews here and here. Apparently this is made from the folks who made Bibdesk, so it has good lineage, and although it is still in Beta one can expect that it will continue to develop.

All of these are for the Mac, but if you are a PC user you can try Scribus or check out this list at Wikipedia.

Getting the Right Writing Tool

dave — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:36:06 +0000

As much as I love Mellel I never thought I would say this, but, I have started using another Word Processing program. Never fear Mellel faithful, I have not abandoned Mellel, I have just added another tool to my word processing repitoire.

Meta-Explanation(feel free to skip if you want)

I have been thinking a lot lately about how are writing tools shape our writing habits (partly because of the discussion over at Kairosnews about teaching students to use various word processors). In essence this is something I am always thinking about, as the question of augmenting the human is in some sense at the heart of my dissertation, but lately I started thinking past the hardware/digital questions that have dominated much of my thinking and what others have written, and started to think solely about software, in particular how similar most word processors are. That is, for the most part (I realize there are exceptions but bear with me), word processing applications are designed in a linear way. This is why most look like you are typing on a page, a virtual typewriter on a virtual piece of paper. Sure there is some deviation from this model (look I can change the color of my virtual page . . .) but again the writing is mostly linear. MS Word, Pages, Nisus Writer, Open Office, GoogleDocs, all operate under this conceit, which is a good idea given that much of what gets written still has as a goal the presentation on a piece of paper (i.e. the important print function). But what if you aren’t planning on printing to paper, or what if you just don’t want to constrict what you are writing to that format just yet. I realize part of this is sort of obvious, of course I use a different program for writing in html than the one I use for writing academic papers. But really, there are not many options out there for writing not-confined to the page format (there are a few, and I know some people who write everything in an outline program like OmniOutliner but none of these have ever appealed to me.) Enter Scrivener.

End Meta-Explanation

I was working on the introduction to my dissertation and having trouble conceiving of the “whole” document. Usually I have a plan of how the sections are going to work in writing a larger piece and I just compose from there, but for some reason this was not working. So, I decided to give Scrivener a try. What Scrivener allows you to do, or at least this is the claim of the program, and I generally think it lives up to this, is just write—get down on “cards” your thoughts, and worry about the order, flow, and detail later. This is a bit hard to explain, I think especially since we are so trained to think of writing as a linear process (write page 1, write page 2, write page 3–go back and edit), but what you can do in Scrivener is just start writing. It is not a page layout program, but rather an instrument for capturing and sorting text.

Scrivener is designed to let you write in blocks/chunks of text and than sort and edit those blocks/chunks. It is a bit like writing on note cards except each note card is as large or as small as you want. What I really like about writing in Scrivener is that it “feels” like a free-writing environment, because I know ultimately the text will have to be sorted, rearranged and edited to fit on a piece of paper, I don’t worry as I am writing about making it adhere to those restrictions just yet. (What I have found though is that this does make the editing process a bit longer.) This probably has its advantages for composing works that are intended for digital distribution as well, where your organization need not necessarily be determined by a page format.

Scrivener was designed with creative writers in mind, and it seems to me that these would we the people most likely to use the software. The ability to write scenes, sort, track and edit those, and finally position them in a narrative arc seems to me what the programer had in mind here. But, that having been said I am finding it tremendously useful for my academic writing.

One of the best features of Scrivener is the full screen mode. I like working in the full screen mode, but no application to-date has had a full screen mode this well done. You can change the size of the writing space, and fade the background, in order to leave subtle notes still viewable on the desktop. There is also a pop-up menu (located at the bottom of the screen) which allows you to change some of the features of full screen mode without leaving and returning.

The other thing I really appreciated about this application was the instruction manual, which comes as a Scrivener file rather than just a .pdf. The advantage here is that the instruction manual teaches you how the program operates as you work through the manual. Which is a good thing, because as I mentioned it does require some getting used to, a bit of a paradigm shift in writing on a computer.

There are actually a lot of other features, useful for storing research, splitting the screen, summarizing what a chunk/block of text says, or your editing comments. I haven’t used most of these, except for to try them out, as again they seem to play to the “creative writing tool.”

I still start some of my writing in Mellel, especially when I have a clear idea of where the paper is going, or its layout. But for my fledging writing I now turn to Scrivener first, compose in it, and export it to an .rtf when it has taken shape as a “paper” rather than just a draft of ideas. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Scrivener is it helped cure some of my writers block that I was having writing the introduction and got me to the next step, and thus has earned a prominent place in my writing applications. Scrivener is $34.99, more than reasonably priced for an application with its feature set, a thirty day trial is free. One other positive note, I emailed the developer with a couple of questions, and he got back to me in less than 24 hours, this always speaks well of an application. Scrivener is not for everyone, I could definitely see this actually getting in the way for some of my students, but it is worth a look if you want to try something a bit different.(Sorry PC folks, Mac only. But if anyone knows of a PC app that works this way let me know or drop it in the comments.)

More about Microsoft Word

dave — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:09:26 +0000

Charlie Lowe, at Kairosnews has an excellent post on thinking critically about Microsoft Word. I won’t try to summarize it, it is too well written for that. Instead I will just say if you are a professor or teacher whose students use Microsoft Word, and especially if it is your job to teach them to write, you should take the time to read his post.