Writing

Tools for writing using a computer fall into two broad camps. On the one side we have WYSIWIG word processing applications like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, and Google Docs. They allow not only the typing of text but also real-time formatting and display. These applications are familiar to most, and are the dominant ones used in higher-ed today. They also tend to be expensive (or available only to those with institutional affiliation), suffer from issues of feature-bloat and unnecessary make-overs, and use proprietary non-human-readable file formats. ...

Academic writing typically requires writing something in drafts. Many drafts. Until recently there have been few ways of elegantly handling this. Often, one would need to title the current draft with the day’s date, then save this draft in a folder (named, e.g., “drafts” or “versions”), and do this every time one sits down to write. This works, in some ways. The data is there. The problem is that you quickly end up with a folder (or desktop’s) worth of files. These filenames have typically ridiculous and increasingly obscure titles (e.g. final-draft-final-revision\final-draft-04-2018.docx). And it is seldom clear, using this method, exactly what one did when, without actually opening a particular file and looking, or trying to remember when (and where) it was that one made the relevant change. ...