: Should I use the plain text typesetting system for my creative texts? Apart from the obvious solutions like MS Word, there are many systems that accept the simple (plain) text along with formatting

Vote Up Vote Down

As a proxy for writers using markup languages, we can take writers using an editor like Emacs l, which includes at the very least Neal Stephenson, source.

We should remember that wordprocessors that include display of font, layout, etc. are a recent invention. In the past of typewritten and handwritten manuscripts the relationship between the written and printed page was much closer to that between markup and printed than a word document and printed.

And even today, there is rarely a neat correspondence between what is displayed in the writers word processor and what gets printed: publishers may set margins, fonts, etc.

So I think there's no necessity to using a word processor. Why might you want to anyway?

Word processors are ubiquitous. Most everyone can open a doc or an rtf file and most publishers can handle these.
Learning a mark up takes time.
Word processors frequently come with other features (ability to add annotations, versioning, collaborative editing, bibliography management) that are nice to have.

That being said, I think it's reasonable and more productive to use plain markup if you are already familiar with the format and are comfortable working with plain text. Here are some advantages:

Text editors like Emacs or Vi offer more efficient editing than word processors generally.
Plain text is even more ubiquitous: every computer of whatever capacity or operating system is capable of opening and editing a plain text file in a decent editor. Not every computer has the latest word processor.
Most markup formats can publish easily to a variety of output formats, so you can get a PDF or a word doc if you need it.
The tooling around plain text is incredible, if you are already comfortable with it. Versioning in particular is solved by mature tools like Git and plain text has good stories for keeping your work organized (you can split say chapters into separate files and compile then together with a simple program).
For certain uses, like documents that include mathematical notation or inline source code, the plain text setting is just orders of magnitude nicer than any word processor I have come across.

I personally do both technical and creative writing in markup (usually Pandoc's Markdown) and vastly prefer it, but I also am familiar with all the tools that make that experience nice. I don't think it's something I'd recommend to people not so familiar.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Although it's not a part of your question per se, there is one place where you absolutely need to use plain text if you hope to publish traditionally: submitting to literary agents. Most, maybe 80%, require pasting in 1,000-10,000 words of plain text after the body of your query letter. I'm not sure why, but that's the way it is. Italics go in CAPS, and all font sizes will appear as 12 point Courier (I think). Illustrations are not possible in the plain-text query, and my experience is if the agent wants to further deal with you, they will want originals mailed to them to put in a format they feel is best for each individual publishing house.

Yes, you can save documents in MS Word twice, one in plain text. Review the plain text document before submitting, as Word sometimes gets confused if you are writing as a .doc, and you'll have to change italics to CAPS "by hand."

(0)