FreeOffice Textmaker

I've been a LibreOffice user for years. It works well enough, is feature rich, and does everything I need.

 

Until now.

I loaded the edited draft of Dead of Winter (Nina Cohen #2), to go through it change by change, comment by comment, and apply those comments to the master manuscript in Obsidian, just as though it was the old days, and we were all still dealing with typed manuscripts. With a 98000 word document, plus many, many comments (E.C. Tobler is a great editor), LibreOffice staggered under the load. Cursor movement was choppy, rendering took visible time, and was often glitchy. In all respects, it behaved like the steaming pile of Java it is, asked to do some significant computing.

This was on my desktop machine, a Core i7 4790K, 32GB of ram, video accelerator, and everything. It's not a heavy breathing gaming machine anymore, but it's no slouch.

So I started looking for a word processor that was better, ran on Linux, and was inexpensive, ideally free.

The pickings were pretty thin. They seem to fall into three camps: mediocre markdown editors, online office suites on JoeBob's server company for twelve bucks a month, and LibreOffice. There was one standout: Softmaker's FreeOffice suite.

So I tried it.

It loaded the file without a hiccup. It displayed all the comments with no issue, and somehow made it easier to read than LibreOffice. And... well, it's free. As in beer, not the other kind.

Like free beer, there's a catch. It's small. Freeoffice TextMaker is an older version of Softmaker Office, which is available as a subscription service*, or as a pro version for a one-time payment. FreeOffice is their way of advertising to the world, "Hey, we sell a nice office suite!" Occasionally, it advertises that fact when you first start it. I'm okay with that.

In truth, I've not asked a great deal of FreeOffice yet, and I've not yet purchased SoftOffice Pro, but on the face of it, if you have corner-case problems with LibreOffice like mine, it's definitely worth checking out. The price, as they say, is right.

*Every time I see "Software as a service," a line from Starter Villain goes through my head: "Imagine testicles as a service..." I can't take them seriously anymore. Thanks Scalzi. :)

 

-JRS

 

Links:

FreeOffice

SoftMaker Office 

Starter Villain 

 

 

Markdown Tools, Revisited

 I've switched to Obsidian for my markdown editing. With the right plugins, it can compile my books into a single wad of markdown that pandoc can ingest comfortably. With the right plugins, and some luck, it's got a grammar checker that will even catch my habit of forgetting closing quotes. (Yes, this makes programming a special joy too.) It's even cross-platform.

Is Obsidian the most wonderful software ever? No. I don't much like the license (for companies larger than 1 person, you have to rent it, otherwise it's free.) I don't really like the UI that much. The plugins are all written in javascript, which I don't know, and it's an electron app, so it's huge. But what Obsidian does is most of what I need, and the plugins make up most of the difference, so for the time being, Obsidian is it.

IA Writer is a lovely thing, but I had a data-loss argument with its library management system. Really, I don't understand why software (to include Obsidian, but less irritatingly so) insists that it has to manage *all* the documents. I am not taking notes. I don't need to graph the interconnections between notes. I am *WRITING A NOVEL*. Sheesh.

Poltergeist 2 is written.

At long last, I've finished the writing of Poltergeist! The Dead of Winter (or Winter's Fury, as it may be renamed to.) It was supposed to be a 50,000 word novel and take about six months to write. Instead it's a 92,000 word novel and took about ten months to write. (A three hour tour, a three hour tour. :P) Nina's back, Cronenberg's back, and of course, Djinn is back. We have an all new cast to meet, new badguy, new friends, new awkward situations.

So what now?

Well, the next couple weeks, I'll be doing a read-through edit. Some of these scenes have been sitting in their files for most of a year, and they need to mesh well with the scenes I wrote *today*. I'll also be reviewing the new sections with my writing group. They make me a better writer. And then, the whole shebang will go to my editor, almost certainly E.C. Tobler again. She's a *very* good editor, and a friend. Cover art is coming along. I'm using new tools to do the cover layout: Afinity Publisher 2, to be exact. I could typeset the whole book in it, obviously, but I doubt I will. I have a *lot* of experience and automation with LaTeX.

When will it be out? It depends. My original goal was to have it out before Christmas, but that assumed six months or so from the time it was done to the time it went into print. The release may be late. I will not rush my 'back end' processes, nor will I rush E.C. Quality before quantity.

How many books am I planning?

Ok, here's how I number them. P1 is Poltergeist! Ask the Dust. P2 is Poltergeist! The Dead of Winter (or Winter's Fury, whichever.) P3 is the one I'm going to start next, tentatively titled Bikini Body. Px is the last book. It already has has several interesting scenes already written. That one seems likely to get written, but no promises. I have an idea for P4 that isn't Px, and there may be more. Px is flexible, and pulls in stuff from previous novels, so I can adapt it to however many there are between then and now.

Clear as mud?

Yeah, it is to me, too. :)

Anyway, watch for more news on the second Poltergeist! novel, coming soon/eventually to an Amazon near you.

-JRS

Things that were Vanishing that are Trendy Again

 Friend Jeff has now posted two lists of "Things That are Slowly Vanishing."

Things that are Slowly Vanishing

More Things that are Slowly Vanishing (Or Gone) 

I was going to reply to the second one, but my own list got too long, so I'm posting it here.

Things that were Vanishing that are Trendy Again 

Mechanical watches: Since they're now strictly a fashion item rather than a utilitarian one. Rolex is still around, and their watches are bloody expensive, and highly decorated, and by all accounts, better than ever. More mechanical watch brands, some classic, some new, many with movements made in China, are cropping up every day to cash in on this trend.

And I'll be honest, when my Apple Watch dies, assuming they don't have one with a blood sugar sensor in it as they've been working on for some years, I might go that route myself. I feel naked without a watch, but I don't need a 32 bit computer on my wrist for most purposes.

Cassette players: Why, god, why?

8-Track Tapes: not quite the resurgence Vinyl is enjoying, probably mostly for the antique car world so you have something to put in that big rectangular hole in the dash. But there are new albums being put on rebuilt vintage cartridges. To which I say again, Why, god, why?

Vinyl Records: Better bandwidth than the average mp3. This one I get. Even with my dodgy hearing I can sometimes hear the artifacts that lossy-compression music poops all over cymbals and the lack of dynamic range. You can get digital sound that's as good as records, but it takes a lot of storage space.

Vacuum tubes: Still manufactured and growing for the electric guitar and high-end audiophile market, both for their distortion properties.

To contradict Jeff, neighborhood mailboxes are alive and well, they're just not the old round-topped rectangular things of our youth. The house I grew up in had a mailbox on the front wall right under the address sign, and you certainly did *not* put your outgoing mail in someone else's outgoing mail holder. Nowadays, my house has a mailbox on the corner with a very anonymous and legally protected outgoing mail slot. Neighborhood mailbox? Check.

Ice Cream Truck: We have one that prowls our neighborhood every summer, although with as much rain as we've had, I haven't heard its dulcet tones much this summer. Now that it's hot (and we're home) I expect to. Also, you can get high end ones to show up for your favorite party. Not gone, just changed form.

Typewriters: Okay, this is a stretch. To my knowledge, they're not being manufactured anymore, but you can still get ribbon cartridges for even weird typewriters like my 1970s corona super 12 with a Google search. Again, no longer a utilitarian item, but for those of us who went from handwriting directly to computer printouts, an interesting curiosity.

Knitting, Crocheting, Needlework of all kinds, and Quilting: Hand work is making a comeback. I'm not a practitioner, but M, my wife, does crochet and needlework, and her sister does the other two. She says it's relaxing, forces her to focus, and tune out all the noise in the world.

Manual machining: The number of YouTube channels dedicated to manual lathe/mill/drill/shaper(!)/surface-grinder work is truly startling. New tools for this are made with the hobbyist in mind every day, and refurbishing big old industrial iron for the task is a hobby unto itself.

 

Handwriting: The trend of not requiring cursive in schools is showing signs of reversing. Also, the net is replete with reprints of old handwriting guides, calligraphy supplies, and so on. No longer utilitarian, but as a handcraft.

 

Pottery: Okay, hand-thrown pottery stopped being how most china was made hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. Now it's done as a craft and an art form.

There's a meta-trend afoot here. Back in the 1980s, I read a book called Megatrends. To some extent, it predicted the technological world we live in today, but it also had an interesting backlash trend. They called it high tech vs high touch. They predicted that the more technology we use, (High Tech), the more hands-on craft we'll see (High Touch.)  If you look at the things that have come back, they all fall into that.

Consider: Handwriting and even typing with a typewriter force you (the writer) to be much more intimate with the document you're creating, rather than just its content. You're not just putting words together, as I am now, you're putting them together, by hand, on this particular piece of paper at this particular time. These are the crafts I know something about. 

 

Having a wristwatch that goes tick doesn't seem like a hand craft, but the machine itself is, and there are hobbyists who are into fixing them. Sooner or later, hobbyists will be making them from scratch.

 

Even vacuum tube electronics are a handcraft, really. Sure, you can do pcbs to put a device together, and if all you want is the finished device, that's fine. But for the joy of it, point-to-point wiring is a handcraft. The smell of the solder, the singed fingers, the anticipating watching tube filaments light and waiting for the high voltage circuit to come up to see if your creation will live, that's a hand-craft in my book. There are people out there who hand-make their own tubes, too, but even if you're just using the equipment, the sound is more analog, more human, even if it's less precise. The hands of humans are all over vacuum tubes.

If Megatrends is right, if it continues to hold true, the more technological we become, the more our handcrafts will matter. And if AI ever takes over, it will be because humans lost interest in technology that didn't let use use our old fashioned, imprecise, primate hands and brains.

To Edit Markdown

Why, exactly, do I need a markdown editor? 

Good question. Almost any code-aware text editor can color-code Markdown so you can see what's highlighted, what's italic, and so on.  But having an editor that can and will display the markdown in its final form, tell you when you've goofed up the syntax by not doing what you had in mind, that kind of thing's useful.

I've tried quite a bunch of markdown editors. So far, I have *one* winner.

iA writer for mac is lovely. It fits my workflow, by having a library manager, a spell checker, a grammar checker, even a usage checker (although it's annoying, so I leave it off unless I'm editing.) It's rock stable. 

Downside? It's Mac only*, and it's expensive (as this sort of software goes.) I'm looking for software that is similar for Linux. No steaming piles of Python need apply (now watch, that's what makes iA writer go. :P ).  Do I *really* have to write my own?

Anyway. That's where I am.  iA writer can apparently compile individual documents direct to .docx or PDF, but as it does not handle multi-documents directly, I don't think that'll be of much use. Pandoc does it better, and uses my templates.

Anyway. That's where I am.

*It's not actually mac-only. There are Windows, Android, and IOS versions as well, just no Linux version. So of my platforms, it's Mac only, because writing long work with a touch-screen keyboard makes my hands hurt just thinking about it.

My final words on Manuskript

I no longer use Manuskript. Between the usual problems of keeping a steaming pile of Python working on both my platforms of choice, and the Manuskript/QT problems where chapters *disappear* if you move them around in the chapter list, I gave up. I had to restore data too many times by using dropbox's rollback function, and once more by resorting to my NAS backup. I stopped using it for my current writing.

However, I am in the final throes of getting "Ask the Dust", formerly known as "The Silent Dust," ready to publish, so I figured I could at least use the compiler in Manuskript and add the pieces I needed to the novel to get it ready for printing.

It lost data on me again.

It lost a whole *scene* silently. I nearly went to press with the first scene of a chapter unceremoniously hacked out.

Worse, I got into a discussion amongst the developers. Apparently the guy who runs the project was rejecting pull requests (new code contributions) because they had too much documentation in the code.

Say what?

I was assured that most of the code was "Self documenting" but there was code that needed special explanation.

That would have gotten you an F in the computer science I was taught. To my ears, it translated to "I don't know what I'm doing." This made me cringe for my data safety. Am I being unfair? Has computer science perhaps moved on since 1986, when I first studied it at the college level? Undoubtedly. Still. It's a problem for *me*.

I've poked around in the code a little, mostly to try to understand what the compiler was actually doing. It's not like it's documented *anywhere* that I could see. I finally wrote a bash program to have it masquerade as pandoc and tell me what flags were really being sent. Here's what the mighty Manuskript compiler really does, albeit not in any particular order:

1. For document file in the project, push every heading tag down one level. Basically find every # tag (how markdown spells <h1>, and add an additional # to it, so the <h1> becomes an <h2> and so on..

2. Pull the chapter name from the custom metadata for each markdown document and put that in as the top level heading. (The <h1> equivilent.)

3. Add a blank line at the end of each markdown document.

4. Concatenate all the modified markdown documents into one big document.

5. Call pandoc with a bunch of flags and feed it the one big document.

It's not exactly rocket science, and it's the only piece I've not been able to replicate with other software. (Mostly vscodium (the Microsoft-free version of Visual Studio Code) with lots of plugins.) You could do it with some bash scripting, a makefile (probably, although my make-fu has become weak). I settled (because I was in a hurry) for using the Manuskript compiler to produce just the combined markdown file, fixing a bug in that file, and throwing it into Pandoc from a bash script, and this was *still* easier and more robust than letting Manuskript do it.

 Wait, I hear you say. What about Manuskript's outlining, character database, world database and so forth and so on. You can't do *that* with vscodium.

You're right. That's a job for a wiki. In fact, I use Smeagol-wiki (A tiny little rust wiki server) for exactly that. And a web browser. And a bit of Go code I put together to build the index files in my wiki automatically, because the files change a lot. You can get smeagol here: https://smeagol.dev/, and my make_index program here https://github.com/jrstrick/Make_Index-for-Smeagol-Wiki (You'll need to install Go to build it though. Working on that.)

I think this vast and disparate architecture, even without Python and QT, is the real problem underlying Manuskript. Like Scrivener, it needs to be a suite of tools rather than one big tool that does the whole thing in one (tabbed) window. I think they've got an awful lot of code to maintain, and I've read (from the developers list) that it's horrifically intertwined with QT, so separating the QT horror out and replacing it with something better—if such a thing can be said to exist. Don't get me started about Linux GUI libraries—has proven very, very difficult. I know that Python, by itself, does not make software bad. I use FreeCAD, I use Blender, and probably a dozen other things I don't even know are python every day. But I think python plus QT plus embedded Chromium plus making a program that does too many different, non-trivial things probably is.

I wanted to love Manuskript. Here was an open source replacement for Scrivener. It worked. Writing fiction in markdown has been a godsend. But I can't love software that loses my data. I can't love software that dies every time I upgrade my system and the python environment gets changed out from under it. I can't love a wordprocessor that is so resource intensive it won't run well on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM. I can't love Manuskript as it is, and because it's in python, I can't even try to fix it.

So. No more Manuskript for me. I don't see this changing.

btw: the my current vscode/vscodium addon stack is this: LTEX-LanguageTool grammar/spell checking, by valintįn, Markdown Fiction Writer by vsc-zoctarine, Markdown Links by tchayen, Marky stats by robole, the standard pandoc markdown syntax addon, Simple Markdown Header by sguerri, Markdown Preview Mermaid Support by bierner, Markdown Table by Takumil, and Text Toolbox by carlocardella.  Markdown Fiction Writer even has a compiler, of sorts, although it's pretty awkward to use for large scale documents. You may have to download Markdown Fiction Writer separately from the microsoft addon store (it's free) if you're using codium. I'm unclear why, but that's what worked.

 

I use vscodium for writing, because I have an entirely different addon stack in Visual Studio Code, that I use for, yanno, writing code. Yes, I know about profiles, I just don't do it that way.

New Host

 Migrating the web side of things to a different hosting company. Once DNS cuts over, you'll be going there instead of Dreamhost. Please let me know if, in the next few days, you see anything weird going on with my website.

-JRS

Un-broke the website

 Dreamhost apparently changed versions of PHP on me, and broke quite a few things in my admittedly antediluvian PHP, most notably simplepie, which feeds this blog onto my home page.

I'm strongly thinking of replacing Dreamhost (for other issues. I'm sure the PHP change was a security thing.) I'm also strongly thinking of replacing my home-grown hodge-podge CMS system with something else.

What, I have no idea, but having put PHP aside for what... eight years? I don't think I like it anymore.

New novels in the works. That'd be a great time to redo the website. I'll already be reskinning it.

Anyway, we're back.

-JRS