http://blog.nottoobadsoftware.com/textsmith/

It’s a bit hard to classify, but here goes:

• Integrated Writing Environment:
  Like the Integrated Development Environments (IDE) programmers use, it tries to provide writers with all the tools they need, and lets them adapt it to their workflow.
• Semantic Text Editor:
  It lets you describe what the text means as opposed to how it looks.
• Word Processor:
  This term is normally used for Word, OpenOffice, Pages etc, but these are more page layout applications than literally “word processors”. TextSmith, with its various plug-ins for importing, transforming and exporting text, can literally perform “word processing”.

But the best description is probably just “Writing Application” (as in; an application for writing).

The ultimate writing software should let you:

• go back to any previous version of any part of the text.
• keep different versions of the same part of the text, and easily switch between them.
• focus on content and structure.
• write any type of text meant for humans.
• export to any format imaginable.
• collaborate with other people.

In May 2004, Adam C. Engst wrote about WriteRight: The Writer’s Word Processor where he laid out his idea of the perfect word processor. Over 6 1/2 years later there is still no such thing. Scrivener is a major leap forward but I feel it is still lacking in some areas, so here I have outlined my own ideas for the perfect writing software. Unfortunately all the good names are taken. The mediocre ones too. So I give you:

TextSmith

TextSmith is a desktop application (with tablet versions geared towards proofreading and commenting). It focuses on the content and structure of the text, leaving formatting and layout for later (or preferably to other people). A TextSmith file is more like a project than a document, since it can contain as many separate pieces of text you want plus research, links, webpages, media files, PDFs, etc.

Fearless editing

Writing should be fun. And even when it isn’t, you should at least feel free to try whatever you want. Change that paragraph. Move that over here. Delete that. Write something, even if it most likely will be bad and soon discarded. The only way you will be able to do this without restraint is if you know you can always get back to how things were before you messed up.

This is why TextSmith lets you view the history of every paragraph, section or the entire text and restore it to a previous version. You can also make a snapshot and label the current version for future reference. And if you have made some changes you’re not quite sure about and want to get back to later, you can keep them as an alternative version of that part of the text.

So just like Time Machine on the Mac allows you to go back to previous versions of your files, TextSmith allows you to go back to any previous version of any part of your text.

Focus

When writing it is best to focus only on the text itself, everything else is just distracting.

Which is why TextSmith will not let you do any formatting or layout in the editor. You can underline, strikethrough, embolden and italicise, but that’s it! No fiddling with points and centimetres and colours and what have you.

TextSmith will refuse to write two or more consecutive spaces, or leave single spaces at the beginning or end of a paragraph, since that is not something anyone is ever going to need. Nor can you add tabs or other special characters only used for layout. Not having to deal with all the invisible characters that somehow have snuck into the text is going to be a big relief.

You can view one section or even just one paragraph at a time, to keep you from nitpicking on what you just wrote and keep on writing. And you can view different versions of a section or paragraph side-by-side, to see which one works best.

Write once, read anywhere

Despite what Word, OpenOffice and Pages seem to think I am pretty sure the vast majority of text produced today will never end up on a piece of paper. But it does end up in many different formats in many different places, and there’s only one way a single piece of software can handle all that.

Namely by letting you add plugins for exporting, importing and syncing. They will allow you to export to and import from RTF, Word, OpenOffice, plain text, PDF, HTML, XML, laTex, ePub, Kindle or even Microsoft Works if anyone can be bothered to make a plugin for it. And you can send the text directly to a blog, CMS, wiki or to eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, your editor/publisher, etc. You get the point.

In order to use one editor to produce all these different types of documents there needs to be a very flexible way of organising and preparing the text so it can be properly formatted and exported later on. TextSmith lets you structure the text like in an outliner, and will then automatically detect headings and what level they are at. This leaves you with setting the type of the paragraphs (body, quote, info box, etc. plus any custom types). Words, paragraphs and sections can be tagged and annotated with any meta data you want.

Since TextSmith can be used to import and export just about any type of text, it will need to handle the following:

• bulleted lists
• numbered lists
• footnotes *
• endnotes *
• images (with captions)
• other media
• tables
• hyperlinks (both internal and external) *
• bibliographies
• automatic numbering and referencing (of headings, images, tables etc)
• comments *

* these are basically just selected parts of the text with added meta data.

Collaboration

People who are lucky enough to have co-authors, editors or just know someone who’s willing to give feedback will probably want to get all that input without having to send a lot of e-mails with attachments back and forth.

If everyone involved uses TextSmith then they can all see everyone else’s changes as they are happening, right in the editor. No surprise there. Those who have not started using TextSmith yet can access the text on the TextSmith Document Server website, which has basic editing and commenting functionality. If Apache Wave (formerly Google Wave) takes off TextSmith will be compatible with it so people can contribute using their own Wave clients.

You can of course limit people to only commenting, but with full access to the history of your text you can safely allow other people to make changes and then easily dismiss their contributions or keep them as alternative versions.

Miscellaneous

• Needless to say TextSmith will autosave your work for you. New projects will be saved in the designated draft folder until you can be bothered to move them where they belong.
• The search function knows what a word, sentence, paragraph, section and heading is, and it will never ask if you want to continue searching from the beginning. You can save a search, making it similar to a smart playlist in iTunes.
• You can add words to a project dictionary, meaning they will not be recognised in other projects or when spellchecking in other programs.
• TextSmith is scriptable in AppleScript and Python.
• You can set up a to do list which will not allow you to print or export until each item in it is checked. Some items can be automatically checked when completed, like making sure no adjacent paragraphs start with the same word.

Other writing software

Word, Pages, OpenOffice Writer

These focus primarily on formatting and page layout. Word in particular is loaded with features, but finding and correctly using the ones you need isn’t always easy. And none of these are an option if you want to do some distraction free writing.

Scrivener

I love Scrivener, but let’s face it, it’s no TextSmith:

• You can save snapshots, but they only contain the currently selected sections and not the entire project. If you forget to make a snapshot you’re left with the old linear undo.
• A pretty good selection of export options, but no plug-ins. Exported RTF and Word documents do not include styles.
• In general I don’t think it’s strict enough, though most people probably consider that a good thing. You can do all kinds of formatting and layout right in the editor.

Now what?

I would love to see TextSmith developed, but that won’t be easy, fast or cheap. The editor will be a pretty complex bit of custom UI, and the backend datastore will have to handle very large amounts of text with lots of history, plus real-time collaboration. I think it should be possible to sell the basic application at a low price, and make money on the plug-ins.

Update:

A more thorough introduction to this still-hypothetical application can be found here.

Preview when configuring a compile

When it’s time to get my writings out of Scrivener, there will often be a lot of back and forth to get the output just the way I want it. It would save a lot of time if there was an instant preview when configuring the compile settings.

Link to media files

If I drag a movie into the Research folder the entire file is moved into the project. This makes the project file way too big, so instead I create aliases of movies and import them. This works fine, but I lose the ability to play the movie inside Scrivener. It would be nice to have the option to link to media files instead of importing them. I know you can link to files in “Document References”, but then they are hidden away somewhere in the Inspector and easily forgotten.

Export files by drag & drop

I have collected a lot of PDF files in the Research folder, but if I drag them out of Scrivener and onto the desktop nothing happens. I can export using File – Export – Files…, but dragging is quicker and more intuitive.

Automatic syncing

When I open a project that has been synchronised with a folder and there are changes in that folder, Scrivener very helpfully informs me of this and asks if I want to synchronise the changes back into the project. But if I make changes in Scrivener and then close the project without synchronising with the folder first, which I often do, nothing happens. It would make for a better workflow if the synchronisation occurred automatically when opening and closing the project.

Enforce format

This is just nitpicking really, but there could be an option to enforce one text format for a document. That way I can forget about how the text looks and focus on the content. All this boils down to is make “Paste and Match Style” the default action when pasting and dragging text.

The Corkboard

The corkboard is probably one of the main reasons why so many people like Scrivener. There are two modes:

Freeform

Linear

Each card can represent as much text as you want, which sounds obvious, but sadly isn’t. This feature is particularly welcome when writing screenplays.

Customisation

Scrivener is very customisable. This is good news for a program you’re likely to spend a lot of time in. The problem is, the options seem a bit… scattered. The corkboard, for example, is customised in 4 different places:

Preferences – Corkboard

Preferences – Appearance – Card colours.

Corkboard customisation

I couldn’t find the option to show keyword colours as chips on each card, I just happened upon it while searching for something else. You can already set the number of keyboard chips to display on each card (bottom right corner of the screenshot above). Adding the option “None” to the list would make it a lot easier to find, and wouldn’t even take up any screen space. It would also make it impossible to set “Keyword chips” to 5 and still not see any chips, something I initially thought was a bug.

The label of each card is shown by the small coloured square in the top right corner, but when you have many cards and many keyword chips on each card it doesn’t exactly stand out. It would be much easier to get an overview of the labels if the colour of the label was used for the title or maybe even the whole card.

Edit: the helpful people over at the Scrivener forum informed me that it is indeed possible to set the colour of the card to the colour of the label. Just go to View Menu – Use Label Colour In – Index Cards.

Freeform

The freeform corkboard is excellent for getting your different ideas in order, but it would be nice to be able to group different cards together by dragging one next to another and have it automatically snap into place. This would also stop me from wasting time trying to align the cards just right, and instead force me to find better ways to procrastinate. Or write something. Whichever seems possible at the time.

1. Add the folder /Users/<your username>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Voice Memos to Hazel.
2. Enter these settings:
   

   Here is the script:

   tell application "Things"
      set props to {name:"Voice memo"}
      set newToDo to make new to do with properties props
      set notes of newToDo to "[filepath=" & POSIX path of theFile & "]TITLE[/filepath]"
   
   end tell
   

Now, every time you make a voice memo on the iPhone and connect it to your computer a note titled “voice memo” with a link to the sound file will be added to the inbox in Things.

If you don’t have Hazel you can achieve the same thing by setting up a folder action on the voice memos folder. But you will have to modify the script.

In other words; just like on the iPhone. This looks very promising, as long as they still let the rest of us organise our own work in whatever way we want. The iPhone way of having each document exist “inside” the application that created it works fine for casual use, but for any project or task that requires the use of more than one application it is very restricting. We need to be able to keep different types of files that belong together in the same place.

I’m not quite sure how this is going to work though. So lets say you open TextEdit for the first time. An empty document appears. You type some text, move and resize the window, and close the application. Without being asked any questions about saving, name or location. Later you open TextEdit again, and it opens exactly the way it was when you closed it, with the window in the same position and the same size, and the same text inside it. This is as it always should have been.

But then you close the document. Then what? Does the application close too now that there are no documents open? And where can you find the document again? Will all applications come with their own built-in libraries?

If you want to move the document while it’s still open I guess you can select “Move to…” from the “File” menu. Which will have plenty of free space now that the “Save” and “Save as…” items are gone.

Seeing as many (most?) casual computer users don’t really understand the concept of files and folders I hope Apple succeeds in bringing some of the simplicity and usability of the iPhone platform over to the Mac, but without sacrificing the flexibility that easy access to the filesystem provides for the rest of us.

No the dumbest question ever must surely be this one:

It is also probably the one question computer users are asked most often. I feel this most pointless of all questions can only be properly answered like this (click to enlarge):

I recently started using Scrivener, and it is intelligent enough to just assume that you want to keep your changes when you close a document; it automatically saves while you’re working on it. It also assumes that you are intelligent enough to use the “undo” command if you have made changes you don’t want to keep. I wish more applications would have this kind of confidence in its users.

Here are the results of the first test:

She sells seashells by the seashore.

Impressive. How about this one:

How much would be debuted chuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood
How much would with a booby-trapped truck if it would chop the truck would
How much would really would truck truck even good truck woodchuck would

The first one was pretty close, the rest not so much, but in all fairness it’s a very tough phrase. And all in all the accuracy is outstanding. Even better than Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, which is only natural considering it is using the same underlying engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. The editing commands are at first confusing for someone who is used to Dragon NaturallySpeaking (when I started this post I was actually planning on doing a fair bit of complaining about them), but by now I’m pretty happy about them. There are occasional crashes and bugs, like sometimes leaving out the last character when dictating single words or punctuation (which, in the latter case, leads to a whole lot of nothing). But when Nuance fixes those I think we finally, at long last, have a good dictation solution for the Mac.

It is very easy to setup, just follow these simple steps:

1. In the configuration for your Windows virtual machine in Parallels Desktop, under Network Adapter 1, select “Shared Networking” (or the equivalent for VMware Fusion).
2. In System Preferences, under Sharing, enable screen sharing:
   
   Note your IP address (circled in red).
3. Click “Computer Settings”:
   
   Enter a password, otherwise tightvnc-dns may not be able to connect.
4. In your Windows virtual machine, download and unzip tightvnc-dns from here.
5. Double-click vncviewer.exe :
   
   Enter the IP address from step 2 (not necessarily 192.168.4.4 ).
6. Click “Options”:
   
   Click “Disable clipboard transfer”. And reduce the scale if you want a smaller window.
7. Click “OK” and then “Connect”. Enter the password from step 3 and click “OK”.
8. Switch to a Mac application, making sure that vncviewer is still selected in the Windows virtual machine and Dragon NaturallySpeaking is running and active.
9. Start dictating and the text should appear in the active Mac application!