>>>>> "Dave" == Michael Stutz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Dave> Jon Konrath wrote:
>> I'm editing my second book, _Rumored to Exist_, using emacs
>> under Linux. It works better than anything...
Dave> Just a quick note: If anyone's interested, I wrote the
Dave> entire text of The Book Of Linux Music & Sound in vi. All
Dave> the copy editing was done in Turd97 though, which led me to
Dave> two conclusions: 1) I would NEVER try to write anything of
Dave> any real length in Word. What a f*cking hog.
Even though I use emacs for all of my personal writing, I use Word
every day at my job, and I've had to piece together docs for
publication using Word because I had to. Word can be bloated, but my
typical emacs sessions can run between 8-12 megs - I think it's more
that emacs responds better when it's big, where Word responds badly
even when you're typing a shopping list.
The bad thing about Word is that there is no real way to structure a
large document like a book, except to structure it as a bunch of
smaller documents, and then a lot of commands in word don't work
globally. For example, I had a 45 chapter book that was 660 pages,
and when I pulled it into Word as 45 documents, I had to spellcheck 45
times. When I smashed it into one big document, even breathing on the
mouse would trigger the stopwatch cursor as Word churned away, trying
to repaginate everything for no real reason.
Dave> Jon, can you tell us something more about your writing ?
My first book is entitled Summer Rain and was published last September
by iUniverse, the print-on-demand press that was such a great idea
that all of their books are backordered for months. (That's another
story, though.) It's a pretty traditional narrative, but it's set in
the early 90's at Indiana University, at a time where a lot of
technology was going on before most of the public knew what it was,
and it really focuses a lot on the culture of the students who totally
immersed themselves in this lifestyle. The page at
http://rumored.com/summer-rain explains it a lot better, and Michael
interviewed me at dsl.org a bit ago with some great questions about
this.
My second book is called Rumored to Exist. It's a nonlinear piece
that's hard to explain, and it's not done yet, but I hope to finish it
soon. I think I'm going to start calling it the Kentucky Fried Movie
of modern literature. If anyone's interested in checking it out, drop
me a line.
-Jon
