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Saturday, February 25, 2012

Writing tools for phone (Android) and desktop (Windows)

I've previously mentioned the benefits of using future-safe notes.

On the desktop-side, I've been using Scrivener. It's a great application and I generally love it. (It stores things using XML and RTF files -- future-proof even if I need to hack together something to get the data from the XML bits.) The problem? I can only use it when I'm at my desktop. With the kids, this means I'm limited in what I can do while I'm away from my desktop.

While I've had good success writing by way of "draft" emails in Gmail on my phone and copying and pasting in to Scrivener, this only works for pounding out my word-count and totally fails when it comes to actually planning what will be written. It worked great for NaNoWriMo, but when it comes to serious planning restructuring it just doesn't work.

I tried EverNote. I had two problems with it: saving a link on my phone was slow (the app is generally slow to load) and it has a lot of features I didn't need. It's a semi-pay application, and the way they charge makes relying on it problematic without paying for it. I had existing tools which covered all other needs except link synchronizing between my phone and my desktop. In the end, I uninstalled it from my phone as it wasn't useful enough for the storage space it occupied.

I recently installed DropBox, and so I've been interested in applications that can make use of it. Link-synchronization using DropBox is easy and fast on my phone. This is particularly the case because I only care about browsing pages on my phone and saving them for future reference on my desktop. It's one-way synchronization and not two-way.

Actually, I installed DropBox because I had installed Ema Personal Wiki. It's Windows and Android software that uses Markdown for light-weight text formatting. It defaults to using DropBox to synchronize between the desktop and the phone. It's a little like ikiwiki, but it sacrifices features for a GUI. Unfortunately, Ema doesn't support directories and uses a different syntax for free-links.

Now, I have had Papyrus installed for some time. It's a super simple plain-text editor. The thing is -- using Gmail directly was generally more convenient. It's strictly offline, so copying things to/from Papyrus wasn't convenient. The addition of DropBox on my phone, means that copying things to my desktop got easier. However, if I'm using Markdown elsewhere, it makes sense to upgrade to a MarkDown-based editor.


On my phone, this led to the installation of Writer. It's a Markdown-based editor designed for writing documents -- complete with word-count functionality, and representing the text-formatting as-you-type. (Not quite WYSIWYG, you get things like *italic* and **bold**. Very useful if you find yourself sometimes using Markdown-special characters.) Writer currently has no preferences. It does not synchronize with anything, but there are plans to eventually support DropBox (and other) synchronization.

Compared to Epistle, Writer looks to be a little earlier on in the development process. Epistle -- while it doesn't have support for word-count -- supports DropBox to the point you can specify the folder to use, so you can have it access the same documents as Ema. (It doesn't do anything with the wikilinks.) You can enable "HTML preview of Markdown documents" which will get you a reasonably accurate representation of the rendered Markdown after it is saved -- but editing the document is purely plain-text, unlike Writer.

Of the two, I'm favoring Writer. If it had DropBox support with the capability to specify the DropBox folder, there would be no contest. I'm a little surprised I've not seen a clearly open-source Markdown file editor. (Ema is a personal wiki, not just a file editor. It just presents bare Markdown in a plain-text window. It would be nicer if it did some styling.)

Just a note, though, Papyrus, Writer, Epistle and Ema all load faster than EverNote did. They're all more responsive and more useful for general note-taking. Epistle (alone) supports "sharing" links. It does so with editable descriptions -- like EverNote provided -- except it is a ton faster. This combined with the fact I've the folder set to use my PersonalWiki folder will mean I'll keep Epistle installed for link-preservation if for no other reason.


With regards to ikiwiki... It's generally awesome. It's a wiki-compiler that can use Markdown as well many other light-weight formatting languages. It's plug-in based and already has more features than many competing products. It uses a real first-class version control system with all the functionality that goes along with that. It's also written in Perl and has some expectations of a Unix-like operating system.

If you used Linux or a Mac, you would get significantly more functionality if you used ikiwiki instead of Ema. Of course, to make it work with a phone would require a bit of work to get it to work well with DropBox and your phone-native Markdown editor. This would be totally doable, mind you. You need only a little more than what Ema already supports to be basically ikiwiki-compatible, and Ema is open-source. Extending it to support [[free-links]] instead of {free-links}, the .mdwn extension instead of the .txt extension, and basic directory support used by ikiwiki should be straight-forward. Most of the other ikiwiki extensions would then be handled by ikiwiki at compile-time.

Anyway, while exploring Ema, and adapting my Magic Door "beat sheet" to a format that Ema could use reasonably (it is where I need to spend some time), it occurred to me that the whole framework I use in Scrivener could be adapted toward a Markdown-based wiki. It would be better in ikiwiki, of course, but it would work in Ema. I'm going to check it out.

To convert the Scrivener notes in to something I can feed to Ema (and to convert back) I'll be using pandoc.

To create the Markdown, I've told Scrivener to export as HTML, then started off telling pandoc to convert from HTML to Markdown. (pandoc can not convert from RTF to Markdown.) The advantage here is that Markdown supports embedded HTML for things that can not be easily encoded in a lighter-weight markup. When the pandoc-generated Markdown looks incorrect, I can copy/paste directly from Scrivener's HTML.

To convert from Markdown to RTF, I'll use pandoc as well as it supports RTF as an output format. The RTF can be easily imported in to Scrivener. Of course, I'll need to verify the conversion works as expected, but the ad-hoc HTML use in Markdown is a key feature, so if that's missing it's really vastly incomplete. (And I'll have to import HTML documents in to Scrivener.)

I may not be using Ema to edit the individual files on the desktop. There are a couple other options for the (Windows) desktop. MarkdownPad is super pretty, but it looks like WriteMonkey totally wins out on features. While they both have basic word-count support, WriteMonkey supports "sprint writing" with count-down timers, a variety of customizable lookups, etc.

This is what I'm thinking so far, at least. I'll be adapting my "empty" Scrivener project with my various sections for novel development in to a set of Ema-linked Markdown-based Wiki-pages. The Ema-style-links can then be machine-converted to be usable for ikiwiki.