Plain Text vs. Rich Text Format
A couple of months ago I got hooked on the blog Becoming a Writer Seriously after the author and maintainer, Tom Colvin, made a comment here. I’m now a regular reader of his blog, and recommend it to anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time writing anything.
I read one of his earlier articles, In Praise of Rich Text Format - The Universal Format for Writers, and started thinking about how I archive my stories on my laptop. I didn’t do anything about it at the time, but his argument for lucid document format choosing stuck in my head.
Last month I received my first email from a friend with an attachment in the new, highly annoying, highly incompatible docx format from Microsoft Word. It didn’t take long to find some docx converters, but this further annoyance made me think once again about all the different document formats, free and proprietary, scattered across my computer. The receipt of this docx document prompted me to take action.
After some back of the napkin cost-benefit analysis, I decided to go with only two document formats for my writing. The majority of my writing is now done in Plain Text. Plain text forces me to concentrate on just the writing during the draft stages. It’s hard enough for me to avoid procrastination and just write, and one way I’ll procrastinate is spending hours formatting unfinished works, only to reformat them again the next week… sometimes even the next day. Plain text enforces a no frills writing environment, one procrastination problem solved. Plain text also works very will with Subversion, the revision control system I now use and love. This combination makes it very easy to save many drafts of my larger works, easily compare different versions of the work, recall older versions, and not litter my computer with multiple “draft” copies or bloated, versioned copies of Word or OpenOffice documents. And, of course, anyone on any computer can read plain text format.
A couple of my works require extensive formatting beyond just tabs and whitespace. These stories would lose their meaning without the bold, italics, and altered indentations. For these documents I now use Rich Text Format (RTF) for the reason Tom suggests in his article:
[T]he more active we become as writers, the more likely it is that we must trade our work with others, manipulate our text in other programs, like page layout programs, or post our articles on a blog. There is one format that can easily move our text, along with its formatting of type font, boldface and italics, to other writers and programs — and even between PC’s and Mac’s. Of course, that format is RTF, or Rich Text Format.
I believe, and hope, that (X)HTML will win out in the future as the universal document format, but right now that format is too geared for web based usage. Until that day I will stick to RTF and Plain Text.
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5 Responses to “Plain Text vs. Rich Text Format”
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Of course, Jeremy, I agree whole-heartedly. You’ve made a very persuasive argument. I’m curious though: what is your .txt program of choice? RTF of choice?
I see too that the subversion program seems to be working for you. Guess I’ll have to check it out.
BTW, yr blog is getting famous. A friend emailed me about yr post, even before I got to it myself.
Tom
Tom
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Thank you Tom. It’s fun to be part of a great community.
And the answer to your question of, “What word processing software do I use?”
I still use OpenOffice.org Writer. While I like to keep the storage format of the content simple, nothing beats working in a good word processor like Writer, Microsoft Word, Abiword, or many of the others out there.
Wait, you use subversion to control your novel drafts…. you are going to do a follow up post on that, right?
Hi Debra,
Yep, I’ll do a follow up post. But an early warning: If I hadn’t had some experience using Subversion for programming and maintaining software configuration files, I probably wouldn’t be using it. It’s a bit over the top for most creative writing. On the other hand, as my friend Brent said, “The process of writing books and developing software applications is almost identical.” So in my opinion, why not use the same tools when they work for both?
Plus, I find Subversion totally cool, even if I feel like an ueber-geek saying that.