But my preferences about these things are fickle, so changing fonts or font sizes one day would usually lead me to change it all again on another. But none of these questions have to do with the most important one of all: What do you want to say? On a rough writing day when I didn’t want to confront that question, I often found myself wasting time on formatting, thinking that getting the right look would juice my thoughts. You can write in Palatino, or how about Courier-or what about Bookman Old Style? Is your page breaking at a funny spot? Why not adjust the margins, or the point size, or force a break at another point?Īll valid questions, in their own way. A full-featured processor like Word practically invites this-you can double-space, you can single-space-heck, you can 1.75 space. One of mine is adjusting the “look” of a word processing document. Microsoft Word distracts me.Įveryone has their own writing tics and pathologies. In all the time I’ve used text editors, it’s never happened, even once. But let’s just put it this way (and here I’m being charitable): in all my years of using Word, this happened more than once. This only has to happen once to get you thinking about alternatives. Have you ever worked on a complicated section of a chapter or a footnote, only to have Word crash for some unspecified reason and erase your work? I have. So for me, the question of why I would want to use plain text occurred in a much different form: Why don’t I want to keep using Word? And over time, that question became easier and easier to answer: 1. I wrote my dissertation in Microsoft Word, and started writing my book in the same. Unless your name is Ken Thompson and you’ve been happily typing away in Ed, the standard text editor, since 1971, you’re not coming to plain text in a vacuum. I’ll briefly conclude with a rough primer on how I used Pandoc for my book, but the main point of this post is about why I did it, with no apologies for the fact that many of these reasons may not be compelling to everyone. Of course, what is possible is not always desirable, and in this post I want to focus on the specific, idiosyncratic reasons why I wanted (and still want) to write this way, using nothing more than a text editor and Pandoc.
#Mellel academic discount how to#
It is possible to write academic publications in plain text, and in fact, Lincoln Mullen and I are working on a paper that will spell out how to do so in detail. I’ve done the same thing now with a conference paper and journal article, too.
Before submitting the manuscript to my press, I converted all of my plain text files, complete with notes about what to italicize and where to place footnotes, to Microsoft Word documents using a simple program called Pandoc, and the press never knew the difference. In fact, I wrote the entirety of my academic book, forthcoming in early 2013, in plain text files. I’m writing this post partly to tell you that none of these are insuperable obstacles for the academic historian who wants to use plain text. 1 Journals and academic presses generally want our work to be submitted as Word documents, not as text files. Most of all, we need footnotes and all the bibliographic trappings that, “like the high whine of the dentist’s drill,” assure the reader that we are serious professionals and have done our homework. We need the kinds of formatting-like boldface and italics-that do not exist in a plain text file. Most of us still intend for our writing to end up on a printed page. Nonetheless, academic writers-and particularly historians-may well be skeptical about whether working in plain text can really work for them. In fact, I don’t even have to make the general case for using plain text here people like David Sparks, Michael Schechter, and Lincoln Mullen have already done the work for me. Do a simple search for writing in plain text and you’ll find thousands of people making the case for using a file format (*.txt) that worked long before Microsoft Word was a sparkle in Bill Gates’s eye. These days, it seems like the ancient past of personal computing is becoming the wave of the future.
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