Word

Over at Charlie’s Diary, Charlie Stross has an excellent rant entitled Why Microsoft Word Must Die. I’ve written previously of my own feelings about Word: hatred bordering on the pathological. I consider it the apotheosis of everything that can be wrong in a piece of software. Sadly, its open source clones aren’t any better. They are, as the saying goes, bug compatible with the monstrosity they are emulating.

As great as Charlie’s post is, the comments are what’s really interesting. With a couple of exceptions they mostly amount to a long wail of anguish from pitiful souls condemned by circumstances to use Word. I was surprised to learn that even some scientific researchers are being forced to use it.

Charlie’s concern, of course, is writing fiction. He uses a number of tools for that including Scrivener and Vim. In the end, though, he must convert it to Word for his publishers. Other writers do the same. Vernor Vinge, for example, writes his novels with Emacs. Cory Doctorow uses Vim. No one, it seems, wants to actually do their writing in Word.

I wrote and typeset my two (technical) books using Vim and Groff. These days, all my writing is done with Emacs and Org Mode. Mostly that writing gets exported to HTML, but I’d feel comfortable using Org Mode to write a book. In many ways, it’s a superior solution to using Groff. It means working with LaTex instead of Groff¹, which I’m most familiar with, but being able to write in Org Mode would be well worth the effort. My publisher is willing to accept camera ready copy so I would just export to LaTex and run off the PDF.

Even fiction writers can benefit from Org Mode. As of version 8, Org Mode can also export to ODT which should make submitting Word compatible files easier. Writers will choose their own tools for their own reasons but if you want a simple, powerful platform that doesn’t second guess you and can produce output in a variety of formats, it’s hard to beat the Emacs/Org Mode combination.