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September 06
Picking Document Formats

Data is like… super important to me. Especially my own data, and that is one of the reasons I spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that I have a good backup system. That's why one of the things I look at in hyper-perfectionistic detail from time to time is document formats. I have gone through a lot of phases in this regard, and a quick gander through some of my historic document storage locations will show that I've had phases with almost everything. Markdown, LaTeX, plain text, and even inside page layout apps like QuarkXPress and InDesign, I've tried it all for my writing. I've also got notes in Evernote, Google Drive, OneNote, and plain text files, and I don't even want to talk about the mess that's some of my other data.

Text is one of the most basic forms of data you can put on a computer. Writing, on the other hand, isn't necessarily.

When you are writing, you might be writing about something and find it prudent to include some form of multi-media that we tend to consider to be possible and appropriate when writing on computers, especially if the content is later going to be consumed on a computer. This can take many forms:

  • a picture
  • a table
  • a list
  • a link.

The question that I have come up with time and again is what format should the actual writing and drafting go on in. I have used all sorts of writing and text editing products on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and others and have found that different types of writing tend to be best in different programs. For example, each year I participate in NaNoWriMo, write blog posts, and write notes pertaining to projects or tasks I'm working on at the moment.

A novel is actually a fairly simple piece of text at its core. It's not hard at all to just start and go with that particular type of project. I've written those in all sorts of places, and I seem to have the best luck with it when I am not worried about formatting when I first start out. I like NotePad++ on Windows and TextWrangler on Mac OS X. These applications also work well for daily notes, although that's a situation where I prefer OneNote, for its notebook/page organization scheme, and its easy synchronizing between multiple computers using either SharePoint, a mapped drive, or Microsoft SkyDrive.

For blog posts though, especially now that I'm on SharePoint, I've been using Microsoft Word 2010/2013. It works out really well for me because I don't need to rely on a program with a proprietary hidden data store, such as Windows Live Writer, and I don't need to rely on having a network connection (or a good one, at least) and being able to connect to TECT to do the actual writing. In addition, I can post directly to the blog from Word, including formatting, added graphics, links, etc.

Variations on text are always an interesting one. I like the idea of MarkDown, but when it comes right down to it, if I'm going to think a whole lot about document structure, it's easier for me to just fire up OneNote or Word and start in the outline view. LyX is a TeX application for Windows/Mac/Linux that is very much trying to be the Microsoft Word of its particular talents, but its talents aren't something that I need often, and when I do need something that can display math symbols, I've got Microsoft Mathematics and its related plug-ins for Office. And, inexplicably, LyX and OpenOffice/LibreOffice rarely run fast on systems I have. MarkDown would probably be where I'd go if I were writing my blog on a shell directly onto the blog server, and my software supported it. There's even nice software for MarkDown on Windows, but I can't figure out why you'd want it if you have Word. (It is actually fairly nice too, and you can generate HTML with it, which does play nicely with SharePoint, but adding those posts to the blog is an additional step compared to Word.)

Other types of data, such as music, videos, and photos are pretty wild. Other "document" data like spreadsheets and presentations I just create in the native format of whatever application I'm using. I have no incentive to find an open standard for, say, flowcharts; if for no other reason than I have no particular interest in that type of data and I don't know if I'll be terribly broken up if, say, I can't find the original source of the Computer Life Cycle diagram.

Fortunately, music and video formats seem to be pretty additive and although I haven't got any Sorenson or Cinepak video, I don't predict any problems opening my source materials and finished projects in the future. (The ones I still have. I haven't made any videos in a few years, and back when I was making videos, it was harder to justify keeping my source photos around.)

Photos have been an interesting topic. When I first started collecting photos I took, they were JPEG files (which will never go away) but they were stored in the database that is iPhoto. After that, I started shooting RAWs and organizing the photos in what I thought at the time would be somewhat straightforward and more sustainable. Unfortunately, when it comes to photos, sustainable isn't particularly easy and I was still using Adobe Bridge and the DNG converter to actually sort the photos. (Hilarity: either Adobe or Apple is doing it wrong and if for whatever reason I actually wanted to switch to Aperture, I might not be able to get all of the images I've previously converted to DNG into the application.) Lightroom takes a fairly nice middle of the road approach by storing its additional metadata and edit information in a database, but storing your original and edited versions of photos in a regular folder structure, sorted by year and month.

To be honest, I think this conversation would have been more fun a decade ago when there was Office, Works, and more people were using other applications. For those of us who are still using plain text (or RTF) or doc/docx are probably never going to have trouble opening our files. Heavy users of Apple's Page or the Corel WordPerfect suite, on the other hand, may find themselves in trouble in the next few years. The Pages format seems to change every few years and unless you're storing your documents in iCloud, seems to be difficult to move information between the iOS and Macintosh versions. iCloud is fixing that particular a little bit, but also requires that you've got an Internet connection to move documents around.

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