From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Roodwriter@core.com" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Book writing mode? Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 12:44:19 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Message-ID: <10b9idsssv6sq61@corp.supernews.com> References: Reply-To: Roodwriter@core.com NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1085593180 21664 80.91.224.253 (26 May 2004 17:39:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 17:39:40 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed May 26 19:39:31 2004 Return-path: Original-Received: from monty-python.gnu.org ([199.232.76.173]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1BT2NG-0003sh-00 for ; Wed, 26 May 2004 19:39:30 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1BT1lm-0001v2-TF for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 26 May 2004 13:00:46 -0400 Original-Path: shelby.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsfeed.news.ucla.edu!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-04!sn-xit-01!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help User-Agent: KNode/0.7.1 Original-X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Original-Lines: 106 Original-Xref: shelby.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:123472 Original-To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.4 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:18771 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help:18771 juman@jumans.net wrote: > Is there any more then me out there who write articles, books or longer > storys and uses Emacs? If so what mode do you use for easy editing and > do write your text using HTML, DocBook etc or so for easy publishing? > > /juman That's exactly what I do. I'm a free-lance news reporter (local government and features) in the U.S. who works from home. I figure Emacs makes me at least a third more productive, at least I like to think so. I'm also working on my third book. For news stories, which are short, I write in paragraph-indent-text-mode generally with refill-mode turned on. I use the block style, which is what you see here, because I don't need to tab so I don't have problems hitting the caps lock key. Plus it just seems to me more natural and quicker. I have a macro to convert the blocks to tabbed paragraphs and long-lines when I'm done. This is because Emacs' hard carriage return method of line breaking is not what newspapers want. No editor is going to want to assemble lines by hand. Also it facilitates searching my old articles by grep, which I do daily, since for many news stories I need background material, or at least a small fact, like how to spell the copy machine company's name. Another reason to use block style is that Emacs' tabbing is more set up for programmers than writers. I have tons of words programmed into flyspell-mode to fix frequent typos, to capitalize uncapitalized proper nouns and to expand personal abbreviations I take on the fly like "gonna" for "going to" or "hs" for "high school." I use dired after I've completed and saved my story to remove the write permissions for archival purposes. Faster than using an outside file manager. I have an index with the entire pathway to the files for which I have a macro that copies the name into the find-file function and pops up that file at the push of a button. Yup. I don't work hard. I have a large file with phone numbers, names and titles that I always have going in a buffer. It's bookmarked so I can get to it easily. Since it has the names I can use M-/ for completion of names that tangle my fingers and for which I don't have flyspelled. I always have a minimum of five buffers going: the list of phone numbers, my schedule, notes, my current work and list of people I have to call. I suspect we're getting into "More than you really wanted to know" here. But I think that writers that use Emacs are a little underrepresented and maybe we should trade productivity ideas. For example, I made a macro to take a date of birth (I write about criminal sentencings also), delete it and replace it with the proper age. Also another to perform simple addition. I have three old Tandy 102 portables (only 32K, not Emacs compatible) that I use to take notes when I'm covering events and meetings. They're great for this. Obviously when typing furiously I make typos. Also to save time I take notes all in lowercase. When I get back I feed the raw notes into the Linux box by modem. After that I take a sed script with Emacs which fixes many of the typos and capitalizes many of the words. That means I have less fixing when cutting and pasting quotations. When I originally started with Emacs I worked with auto-fill off so I could tab. Now that I don't tab I use either auto-fill on with auto-capitalization or with refill on without auto-capitalization. The refill sometimes fools the auto-capitalization and capitalizes in the wrong place. Since I don't really have a problem with not capitalizing words at the start of sentences, in the last few weeks I've been switching back to refill mode so I don't have to M-q. Yeah, I switch back and forth on a lot of things. I have refill and auto-fill modes bound to function keys so I can switch them on and off as the occasion demands. They're both toggles. As you can see from my signature I've written two books. I'm working on a third. I wrote them using LaTeX using Auctex mode. It's quite handy (Thanks David Kastrup). It colors the tags and even puts in some of them using keyboard shortcuts. There's are even shortcuts for processing (compiling) the LaTeX file and popping up the viewer. Emacs and Auctex make LaTeX fiendishly efficient. Its only drawback is it doesn't seem to like refill mode so you're back to M-qing again. For printing on paper, or for making PDFs, LaTeX is the best. So I've come to the conclusion that for people that spend a lot of time writing--professional writers and probably secretaries--Emacs is the way to go. The problem is that so few people want to learn something new even if in the long run they're working less. I already thanked David Kastrup but there are many others, including some in this group, that have worked on Emacs, including the person that started it all, Richard Stallman. Just two more I know of are Kai Grossjohann and Kevin Rogers. Obviously there are many more and I would name them if I knew all of them. But again, thank all of you for for helping make the greatest writing tool in the world. --Rod __________ Author of "Linux for Non-Geeks--Clear-eyed Answers for Practical Consumers" and "Boring Stories from Uncle Rod." Both are available at http://www.rodwriterpublishing.com/index.html To reply by e-mail, take the extra "o" out of the name.