#Plain text workflow android#

I honestly don’t know what my working/writing environment would be like without Dropbox. I said something similar to those two points a couple weeks ago on Google+ and Ryan Danks (who’s been struggling with plain text and markdown) said:Ĭould you maybe do a blog post on your workflow? I think this might help out a lot of people I know who are still trying to find their groove. That said, the fact that I can export to Word, or epub, or html, or pdf, or rtf, or odt or… well, whatever… means that the work gets out in the best way possible, right away. Those other files are just outputs to me – something I create, but don’t work in like exporting to PDF. epub (took me about a minute, total, to create), and when I get their feedback, I’ll be right back to working on the text files. txt file) in any way.Īlso last week, I sent my work in progress (which comes in at somewhere north of seven hundred pages) off to a couple folks. 2 When I need stuff to go out, I can take my lovely markdown-enhanced text and put it out into the world in whatever format is needed.Īs an example, I finished an academic paper last week with a couple dozen footnotes and within about four minutes I’d published it with full, pretty formatting to a Word doc, PDF, a forum post, and my blog, again without losing any fidelity in the formatting, without needing to do any additional formatting, and without changing the core document (a. Universal TransferralĮventually, you need to ship, and you probably need to ship in something other than plain text.

(And heaven help you if you want to go multi-platform with cloud sharing on something like Scrivener.) Even RTF, which is supposed to be multi-platform, would suffer grave deformations over time, given this kind of abuse.īecause that’s what this sort of situation is for those kinds of files – bouncing them around to different systems and opening in different programs is abuse.

#Plain text workflow android#

Imagine what your word document would look like after a few days of bouncing it between “word-compatible” programs on your PC, Mac, Linux box, iPad, iPhone, Chromebook, and Android tablet. I can edit chapters on my phone while I’m at Grease Monkey, poke at them on my tablet while the kids watch Super Why, open them in a half dozen apps on my mac, windows, or linux machines, and (and this is really important) I don’t lose any fidelity or formatting because I opened them in different programs on different platforms. Here are the big wins for me: Universal Availability I’ve started to see more benefits from working in plain text, all the time. I’ve changed my methods, though my outlook has shifted. md (markdown) files from two or three years ago, but in most cases the pattern until recently has been pretty clear: use those ‘primitive’ formats to do some initial work and note-jotting but, once the serious work begins, copy the whole thing into something like Word.

txt files to be honest, my conversion wasn’t an overnight thing – yes, I can find plain text back as far as I have files, and even. Now, simply saying these things isn’t enough to make everyone (or anyone) suddenly slap their forehead and switch to plain. Lately, I’ve had (or created) several opportunities to talk about using plain text file (and markdown syntax) – how great I think it is for writing and (more importantly, really) how perfect it is for making sure your stuff remains ubiquitously compatible and futureproof.