One little detail seems to be missing from the pydev django support: pydev runs a process on port 8000, conflicting with the django runserver.
Easily solved though.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Fictioneering - tool review
Before writing a new tool, it's only sensible to review what's already available.
The project I have in mind is intended to facilitate the creation of fiction for reading online. IOW it's a web-shaped project. The output is a series of connected html pages.
At this stage of the projet I'm not going to experiment with radical hypertexty stuff: sequential content with at most some pop-up links is what I have in mind.
A plain text editor will obviously do the job. The entry of the text itself is not a problem I have to solve. Markdown or txt2tags or whatever are more than adequate to that task and well proven. It's how that writing is organised which a plain editor doesn't address at all. Gedit and Kate have integrated file managers, which help, but don't offer any assistence in naming and linking the component files.
Specialist web editors such as Bluefish edge closer to my needs. I find them complex, though, with many of their features irrelevant to the task in hand. They promise much but leave me wanting more; e.g. page annotation facilities, visual link graphs, page split and join features, and so on.
OpenOffice has an html output option. It's such a shame the html it produces is poor from both a standards and SEO POV. That said, text annotations are easy and useful, master documents offer a crude but useful means of organising related content, bookmarking makes links abstract, and BASIC macros allow some automation of missing functions.
Lyx has most of the advantages of OpenOffice, plus decent outlining. Of all the extant tools, this is my favorite.
Writer's Cafe is IMO the best of the specialist fiction writing tools out there; but again i find it too complex. I spent more time learning how to use the tools than creating text of my own. That said, its use will probably feel natural for those used to physical scapbooks and card indexes.
All fall short of my needs.
The way I work is all too modern. I write in snatches: an idea here, a bit of dialog there, some random musings, a scrap of verse. Organising such disparate content, filling the gaps and polishing it all is the hard part. None of the existing tools help much with this. Those which are good at organising, such as FreeMind, aren't so good for the writing part; e.g. it would be absurd to have each petty page as a node on a mind map. Full text indexing would be useful. The ability to define placeholders; e.g. to refer to characters in a story by their role, at least until I have a decent name for them; would make a real difference.
Perhaps most important of all, the tool mustn't get in the way of the writing experience. And nor must it take months to write.
One tall order is starting to take shape...
The project I have in mind is intended to facilitate the creation of fiction for reading online. IOW it's a web-shaped project. The output is a series of connected html pages.
At this stage of the projet I'm not going to experiment with radical hypertexty stuff: sequential content with at most some pop-up links is what I have in mind.
A plain text editor will obviously do the job. The entry of the text itself is not a problem I have to solve. Markdown or txt2tags or whatever are more than adequate to that task and well proven. It's how that writing is organised which a plain editor doesn't address at all. Gedit and Kate have integrated file managers, which help, but don't offer any assistence in naming and linking the component files.
Specialist web editors such as Bluefish edge closer to my needs. I find them complex, though, with many of their features irrelevant to the task in hand. They promise much but leave me wanting more; e.g. page annotation facilities, visual link graphs, page split and join features, and so on.
OpenOffice has an html output option. It's such a shame the html it produces is poor from both a standards and SEO POV. That said, text annotations are easy and useful, master documents offer a crude but useful means of organising related content, bookmarking makes links abstract, and BASIC macros allow some automation of missing functions.
Lyx has most of the advantages of OpenOffice, plus decent outlining. Of all the extant tools, this is my favorite.
Writer's Cafe is IMO the best of the specialist fiction writing tools out there; but again i find it too complex. I spent more time learning how to use the tools than creating text of my own. That said, its use will probably feel natural for those used to physical scapbooks and card indexes.
All fall short of my needs.
The way I work is all too modern. I write in snatches: an idea here, a bit of dialog there, some random musings, a scrap of verse. Organising such disparate content, filling the gaps and polishing it all is the hard part. None of the existing tools help much with this. Those which are good at organising, such as FreeMind, aren't so good for the writing part; e.g. it would be absurd to have each petty page as a node on a mind map. Full text indexing would be useful. The ability to define placeholders; e.g. to refer to characters in a story by their role, at least until I have a decent name for them; would make a real difference.
Perhaps most important of all, the tool mustn't get in the way of the writing experience. And nor must it take months to write.
One tall order is starting to take shape...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)