Writing Links

Why Junk Word, and What to Use Instead

What is wrong with Word and the like:

• "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"
• "Against WYSIWYG"
• "Proprietary Binary Data Formats: Just Say No!"

Markdown

• "Why Markdown? A two-minute explanation"
• "Markdown: The Syntax You (Probably) Already Know" (ProfHacker blog) at the Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• "How to ditch Word"
• "Markdown" (John Gruber, creator of Markdown)
  • See especially "Markdown: Basics"]( http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics)
• "78 Tools for Writing and Previewing Markdown"
• "Markdown is the New WORD 5.1" (historical and funny essay)
• "Markdown" (Wikipedia)

Converting Markdown using Pandoc

• "Pandoc Converts All Your (Text) Documents" (ProfHacker)
• "Pandoc: a universal document converter"

The text editors I showed you today:

• WriteRoom
  • WriteRoom has a bunch of cool themes you can use
• Emacs (consider terminal-only mode!)

Revision History, Version Control, and Collaborative Editing

The Basics:

• "A Gentle Introduction to Version Control"
• "Consider Revision Control Methods for Documents"

Common, but non-ideal solutions:

• "Collaborate on Word Documents with Track Changes"
  • For Word, you should consult the help files for how to use "Track Changes" in your particular version.
• "Chat and real-time collaboration" (Google Docs/Drive)
• "How to Use Dropbox as a Killer Collaborative Work Tool"

These are some pretty cool online, collaborative editing platforms that do version control and use markdown:

• Authorae
• Draft
• Editorially

This is the really techie stuff:

• Subversion
• Git
• GitHub