Like many such apps, it's a pure text editor, meaning you can't even use bold or italics or such. Pure text. This is great for concentrating on pure writing. But... I usually think of which words I want to emphasize while I'm writing, it would feel odd to go over the text later just to put in those. And standard manuscripts, pre-Internet, used underlining for all emphasis, for clarity.
Any working writers who can tell me how they do this? And how to editors in various fields want their manuscripts? Pure text? Some formatting? How much?
6 comments:
When writing in plain text (my strong preference), I generally use Markdown syntax to represent formatting—surround text with single asterisks or underscores for italics, or double asterisks or underscores for bold. Both TidBITS and Macworld use Markdown, as does my blog, so I know the necessary transformations will take place before publication. And even when stuff is just for myself, or for another outlet, it's trivially easy to convert between Markdown and real styles when the occasion arises.
Thanks. That sounds like a good idea. And I already use asterisks for emphasis in email, it works really well when you want to email pure text for compatibility. (Though it seems not many people these days use it.)
BTW, what's an easy tool for converting from "Markdown"?
There are a bunch of tools for working with Markdown, though most are built into content management systems and blog systems. If you use BBEdit, there's a shell script you can download from John Gruber's site (I think; it was a long time ago when I got it) that will turn Markdown into HTML, and once copied to the right location, becomes accessible via a menu item in BBEdit. It may work in TextWrangler too; not sure.
Thanks to Adam for:
http://thurly.net/1cd7
http://thurly.net/1cd8
And:
http://thurly.net/b4l
Interesting, I think I'll study this markdown a bit. One doesn't have to know *all* the codes to get good use from it.
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