Putting words to digital paper

The other day while I was watching Pyrocynical's This Guy Sucks video something that he said jump up to me, and frankly derailed the stream for a good while; he had bought a license for Microsoft Office for £150. As Wendigoon would put it "Imagine asking daddy bill gates for permission to make a video"

And to be quite honest I do agree with mocking Pyrocynical for buying Office and not using one of the many, many, alternatives to Microsoft Office's Word.

The freedom of writing

Wherever you are an academic, a professional writer, a fanfic aficionado, a student taking notes or simply want to record something down on a computer you have at one point or another used a word processor to put words to digital paper. As many of us who have ever touched a computer, the first thing we have used for this may have been Microsoft Office's Word.

Being installed in practically every windows computer that has ever been sold is easy to see why it has become a standard, but it's not necessary to pay to have access to a what you see is what you get word processor that has the functionality that 90% of the people need it for.

Word is literally free

We live in an internet era where access to the internet is not only expected, is practically is a human right at this point, and if you want to use a word processor it is at easy as going to <outlook.live.com>, logging in to that Microsoft Passport account you made to play Halo 3 multiplayer the 360 and click on the Word icon on the left panel.

While this online only version of Word may not have the whole functionality that the native Windows or Mac application have, it certainly has the functionality that you need to write something down.

The superior free online experience

It may come as a surprise that I first recommend the online version of Word instead of the obvious online editor, after all Google Docs is the standard for online, and even offline, office work, specially since it's been build from the ground up to work online with multiple people and been accessible from any computer, bur for someone who is already familiar with Word, using the online version is probably going to have the less friction.

Still Google Docs, works excellently for editing text and is easy to use. It's free of cost, as long as you have an internet connection you'll have access to all your documents by logging in to your Google account.

Local freedom

Being able to work with documents online is great, but for those who love keeping their own data in their own computers there is no substitute to having a local program installed.

For this there is a number of alternatives like WPS Office, and ONLYOFFICE but as a lover of Free Software my personal recommendation would definitely be LibreOffice.

Of course all these are full office suites, just like MS Office is, but you don't care about spreadsheets and presentation software stand alone word processors like Abiword exist, although they are much more rarer.

Rich text for poor folks

One alternative to Word that I haven't talked about yet, but does need to be mentioned is the recently discontinued WordPad. This word processor is not only free, it's quite literally already installed in your computer if you are using Windows.

It's most important characteristic is that it uses the Rich Text Format, a format that, while technically being proprietary is widely used freely across the internet, as it was originally designed for cross-platform document interchange.

This being the case there are some alternatives to WordPad that may interest you, like FocusWriter a simple text editor that has basic support for RTF and the openDocument format, and whose main mission is letting you focus on the process of writing.

Plain text, fancy documents

The last way save your words into a digital document that I want to talk about is probably the oldest way to do it. No fancy formating, no worrying about how it will look in print, just writing down what you need to save and worry about all that other stuff later.

This is where plain text files come in.

While you can use fancy word processors to write a plain text file, a simple text editor is all you need to get started. From the humble notepad, to fancy hackable text editors, all you need is your empty file, your keyboard and the time to get your ideas to the document, a simple text file is all you may want or need, but you'll be missing some of the simple flourishes you may be used to... or do you?

Mark it up

While there are many markup languages, the ones that are easier to pick up and learn for someone who is interested in just sitting down to write are those meant to be easily ported to other formats, but more importantly are readable in their plain text form.

In my personal opinion Markdown is the best plain text markup language, mostly due to it's main philosophy that is for it to be an easy-to-read, easy-to-write format.

It's formating is quite simple, headings use the hash character (#), the number of it being equivalent to the depth of an HTML <hn> tag, where n is the number of hash characters in the heading

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# Heading one equivalent to <h1>
## Heading one equivalent to <h2>
### Heading one equivalent to <h3>
#### Heading one equivalent to <h4>
##### Heading one equivalent to <h5>
###### Heading one equivalent to <h6>

Paragraphs are simple one or more lines of text delimited by one or more empty
lines.

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This is a paragraph

This
is
a
paragraph

This is
a paragraph

Bold and italic text are demarcated with asterisks (*) or underscores (_), one
for italics, two for bold, three for both.

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*Italics*
_Italics_
**Bold**
__Bold__
***Bold and italic***
___Bold and italic___

This is only a small sample of how markdown works, but the point I want to make
is that Markdown is simple, easy to read by itself and extensible. It powers a
number of note taking applications like Notion, Joplin and Obsidian; it's syntax is used in a large number of places like Reddit, Github, Tumblr, and it may be available in places you may not expect it like for formating Whatsapp messages.

Markdown is not the only plain text markup language and if you find it lacking
there are a number of alternatives to it that may focus on more specific aspects
that you may prefer, like reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, Org
Mode
, Neorg and others.

The most important thing I want you to take from this post is that it doesn't
really matter what you are using to write, the most important thing is for you
to write it¹.

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This post was written in markdown using the Neovim text editor

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Pub: 11 Mar 2024 05:09 UTC

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