Danns.co.uk

I'm so unbelievably sick of the current state of document processors. Don't get me wrong -- I love that OpenOffice.org is doing so well, but everyone knows it's a Microsoft Office clone. KOffice at least is breaking the mould and doing things a little differently, but basically they all use the same WYSIWYG design. Ask any web designer, application programmer etc... and they will all tell you of the importance of separating content from style, or model from view. Why are things so different in the world of document editing? Yes, you can do styles in these applications, but honestly -- does anyone bother? Why would you? They're still geared toward endless tweaking. As a hopeless pedant, I can waste hours tweaking until I'm happy, and in these things the tweaking really has to happen before you can carry on with the content.

I'm quite a fan of ConTeXt (a new TeX macro package like LaTeX). It's great to be able to concentrate on content, but that only happens for 20% of the time. I still find myself worrying about style. In fact I spend even longer tweaking with ConTeXt because it's so mind-bogglingly complicated to get things looking just right. That's because it's geared toward humongous documents, not short things. I have the same problem with Vim. I'm a big fan of Vi's modal keyboard-only editing paradigm. Not having to reach to the mouse every 10 seconds is like a huge weight off my shoulders, but when I want to see a right-hand margin to warn me when the line's too long I have to go to Google. I still haven't figured out how to do that by the way! (The margin, not Google.)

Now I'm really excited about the guy that added Vi bindings to Kate for his Google Summer of Code a few months ago. That is an inspired idea. I've been hoping for it for a while now. The great thing about this is that it makes it possible to use a graphical editor, which presents countless options for your tweaking needs in an easily-discoverable place just a few clicks down in some options menu, but it's still possible to do your actual text editing without all that reaching-for-the-mouse malarkey. If I want a visible right-hand margin, I won't begrudge reaching for the mouse to search through a menu, since it's really a one-time thing, and the ease of searching through a visible menu far outweighs the nuisance of reaching for the mouse. But with Vim, you'd have to troll through endless documentation to find the right switch or script, which probably then won't work quite right anyway!

Yes, so the Kate+Vi-Bindings combo is perfect in my mind, although I haven't had an opportunity to try it yet. But what about document editing? As I said, I've been using ConTeXt to create nice documents for work recently, and I like the results, but getting there is a nightmare. What I really want is a separation of style configuration from content editing. I want a graphical style configuration application (a bit like Qt Designer) that allows me to easily discover and tweak configuration, combined with a simple no-fuss text editor. In my mind, there's a link there -- Kate + Vi-Bindings is like Style-Designer + Text-Editor.

I briefly toyed with the idea of using XML+CSS. That actually works quite well. That is, the flow is quite good. You really can concentrate only on content with the XML, and only style with the CSS (up to a certain point). However, there aren't any browsers that really do a good job of text flow. They're probably about as good as Word or OpenOffice, but TeX simply blows all competition out of the water when it comes to beautifully layed-out text.

Bah, I guess I'll add this to my to-do list and spend however long beating myself up over how I never get around to it because I have so little time & energy. With any luck, some fortunate student with all the time in the world will come along and do exactly what I want. Fingers crossed :)