Making the Act of Writing Suck Less

Will Styler - CSS Colloquium

https://savethevowels.org/talks/make_writing_suck_less.html


Writing kind of sucks


We are trapped in a world of unintuitive tools



It wasn’t always this way



We have been convinced by bad tools that this is how writing is done


What if there were another way?


We want to write, as smoothly as possible


Microsoft Word


Statement of Bias


Today’s Plan


The Semantics of Formatting


Formatting should mean something


For most people


Bad formatting is bad teaching


Formatting is important


Microsoft Word Sucks


Microsoft Word is great for somebody’s grandmother


It makes writing, then styling everything afterwards, easy


You are not Edna


Word absolutely, irredeemably sucks for academic writing


LaTeX is better


LaTeX is a form of the TeX programming language


Documents are programmed




LaTeX does a lot of the work for you


The boring parts are regenerated every time you run the command


LaTeX has incredible depth


LaTeX sucks


Microsoft Word’s Learning Curve


LaTeX’s learning Curve


Installing LaTeX is not straightforward


Track Changes isn’t a thing


“You don’t use Word?!”


LaTeX is harder to share


LaTeX is heavy


LaTeX has massive power, but with massive overhead


Markdown is amazing


Markdown is a lightweight plaintext formatting language


Aside: Plaintext is the best format for storing data (🤡)


Never put your data into software you can’t take it out of


Markdown uses symbols to format plaintext



Markdown is super easy


Markdown is super fast


I use Markdown for everything


It’s supported by a lot of great apps


Markdown sucks (a little)


Markdown is a tiny specification


Missing pieces in Markdown


Markdown requires another program to style it


Markdown is designed for conversion


Pandoc


Pandoc is a document conversion program


Pandoc will change your life


Pandoc allows mixing of markup conventions!


Markdown + LaTeX is wildly powerful


This is how I wrote my dissertation, as well as many of my papers


You can also use different templates


Pandoc doesn’t really suck


This is my life now


Everything is written in Markdown


I use Pandoc to create polished documents where I need it


Let’s get nerdy…


This Script runs every thirty seconds


This is the dream


Writing always sucks a little


Thank you!

https://savethevowels.org/talks/make_writing_suck_less.html