I fancy myself a writer. Not, mind you, a good one. Just a passable one.
I am, however, definitively a programmer. This means that I like things like version control, scriptable or programmable tools, and open, easily interchangeable formats.
Currently, when I write things I write them in RTF or in ASCII with Markdown. I really like Markdown. I used to like RTF, until I realized that it has no really standard implementation. So I have resolved to move my writing away from RTF and into Markdown only.
So, ideally, here’s my writing setup:
- Any writing project is a git repository.
- All source files for the project are written in Markdown
- When a project is finished, an HTML version is produced using the python implementation of Markdown
- Additionally, when a project is finished, a PDF version is created with wkhtml2pdf
- Optionally, if I want to get designery, output files include some nice CSS, injected in either through a hack or some sort of nice templating tool (Jinja, anyone?).
It seems like a nice idea. Of course, the problem with it is that I have a bunch of stuff not produced in this fashion, and I need to convert it (mostly because I’m slightly OCD about having all my stuff in a similar state, but that is neither here nor there). Aaron Swartz has a nice tool called html2text, which works reasonably well as part of an RTF to HTML to Markdown conversion flow. The only problem now is that the Markdown produced doesn’t return to an entirely accurate final format.
I’ll continue on here about my experiments in this vein. In the meantime, other writers reading this: what is your setup, ideal or otherwise?