The Mandelbear's Musings

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient, a 1999 essay by Allin Cottrell. Still, sadly, as true as it was then.

(From Don Marti.)

Currently I do almost all my writing in HTML using a plain text editor, GNU Emacs. My filksongs are still all in LaTeX with a couple of custom macros for typesetting chords and passing metadata to my various scripts, and to-do lists and random notes are in plain text. I hardly ever have to think about how a document is going to look when it's printed, beyond tweaking with a song's layout parameters so that it fits on a single page. About the only thing I have in a word processor at the moment are business cards.