The Future of the Word Processor (2016)
&quot;Word processors&quot; were always a stilted compromise; they try to weave together the acts of composition and layout, when each necessarily constrains the other. As you compose a document in a word processor, you end up &quot;fighting yourself&quot;—making changes on the composition side that require matching changes on the layout side, or vice-versa. And not only this, the two tasks are mutually <i>distracting</i>—fiddling with layout after writing a single sentence can be used as a means of procrastinating from writing the next sentence; and endless copyediting can be used as a distraction from deciding on layout. A program that functions to do both tasks concurrently, is often far <i>less</i> than the sum of its parts, in productivity terms.<p>Everything is much simplified if you just avoid this weaving altogether, and adopt a content <i>pipeline</i> approach, as every commercial book publisher, newspaper and magazine does. In this approach, you use pure-composition programs for your composition, and pure-layout programs for your layout. When you are working on one, you are not distracted with the demands of the other.<p>In fact, two different people can be working asynchronously on these two components; and, indeed, if the work of one stage is finished first, this enables an extremely useful <i>static</i> constraint on the work of the other, simplifying the decision-making for it greatly. Layout can determine target word-count; or word-count and paragraph composition can decide layout.<p>What you <i>don&#x27;t</i> have is the constant tweaking, pitting half-finished layout and half-finished prose against one-another. Each is effectively opaque to the other until the end of the process.<p>The most wonderful thing that has happened to composition in recent memory is the GUI Markdown editor. Until these, all composition programs that weren&#x27;t simply plaintext, had at least some layout elements. (This is because their target format was RTF, and RTF contains things like per-line margin settings.) But .md is a fine format for storing compositions: it lets you specify the &quot;tone&quot; of text with markup, but contains no mechanism to (reliably) specify final appearance.<p>Combine such documents with a program like Publisher or InDesign (or, partially, LyX or Pages) for layout, and you&#x27;ve got a very nice workflow. And, as a side-benefit, the prose created during the composition step will be exactly what is needed for web publishing as well.