text-tosterone
New Adventures in HiFi Text, a recommended read from Daring Fireball
I default to plain text whenever I write too. I can’t remember the last time I used Word other than to read a document authored by someone else. As for formatted email!.. just about the lamest thing you can do on a computer as far as I’m concerned.
I originate most of my documentation using an XML markup language. Markup rolls off my fingers pretty effortlessly (as you’d expect) and my text editor is optimised to produce it. I can markup a document much faster than I can write a document in Word. For me XHTML 2 was the natural choice over something like TeX or Markdown, as I practically think in HTML… what else would I use. Also having the original lying around as XML seems too useful.
So that people can actually read it I use XSLT to transform to HTML+CSS and XSL-F0 to generate PDFs. If needed I could generate pretty much any other format, RTF, wordML etc. but if someone absolutely has to read it in Word then the HTML version opens in Word with more than pretty decent formatting in tact so…
My main computer is a Mac so the XSLT transform is generated with Libxslt which is installed by default on OS X these days and Marc Liyanage’s free testXSLT utility comes in handy. For the PDF transform I use FOP which is opensource and was brain-numbingly simple to install on a Mac even for me.
As an aside: XML permeates my entire workflow, I’ve taylor-made some some tools for my Job Timing/Timesheet creation and Invoicing which only a geek could love. They are intergrated with the Systems iCal Calendar and Addressbook and output an XML document and a reasonably spivey looky PDF (via FOP). All PDF transforms pull my Company Logo from an SVG file located in the System Library.
