Creating text productively

Most of us spend a fair amount of time creating or dealing with text: email, reports, evaluations, proposals, and the like. Over the years, I've found one tool that consistently has helped me to be more productive at generating text in any format: Emacs (check out their quick guided tour—I learned something new there). It may look like an editor for software engineers, but it's really much more general than that.

I'm not interested in starting an "editor war" with those who prefer other editors (or word processors, for that matter), for it's to some degree a matter of personal fit. I did want to point out that IBM has a tutorial on learning Emacs, for those starting out. So does Emacs, for that matter (it starts automatically the first time you run Emacs); the IBM version has the potential advantage that you can read through it before you install the software, although you will learn more by actually using it.

For those of you who would like to walk through the IBM tutorial (it requires free registration), check out these, or search on their site for more specialized material:

1. Living in Emacs
   
2. Learn the basics of Emacs
   
3. Learn the essential modes and editing features of Emacs
   
4. Advanced Emacs text operations
   

Emacs does run on pretty much any computer platform you might have.

For those of you saying, "But I want nicely formatted documents, not pure text," see Business writing made easier. And for any of you really into text, check out Antiword as a tool to convert a Word document back into text. It's usually faster to open a document in Antiword than in Word.

New tools for writing

From time to time, I hear of people seeking easy ways to publish documents in PDF format. Sure, many still use Word and send their documents along as .doc files, but there's a perception of being complete that comes with PDF files, and PDF files look the same on all computers, unlike Word files.

For many, it's not easy to produce PDFs, though. They could buy Adobe Acrobat, but they can't justify the expense for the number of documents they'd convert in a year. They could do it in LaTeX, but that requires a bit of skill they don't have time to develop.

I recently discovered another approach that many may find easier. Parsewiki takes structured plain text and turns it into various formats: DocBook, HTML, or LaTeX. Then, if you have a DocBook toolchain installed, you can create PDF files quickly. That's doable on Windows, and it seemed trivial on Linux. It's not the tool you want for bigger documents, but it may work quite well for you for the one- or two-page memo or summary you'd like to produce.