Hello, What tools do people find useful for writing on OpenBSD? By writing I mean long form such as novels and technical books, including plot and character development, outlining, and formatting for publishing (not all the same application necessarily)
I agree with the majority of people here, use a text editor you are comfortable with. I use nvi, I've tryed a lot, but I always go back to nvi. Remember that the version in base doesn't have unicode support. One that almost got me was the new fork of nedit: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xnedit/ My advise is to think about your layout, how people are going to read your work, and then "mark" that layout in a plain text file, using spaces, labels, etc. Write freely, without being distracted by strange lines and your text being transformed while you are typing it, lags... oh man, I don't know why people like those monstrosities, but a lot of people love them so maybe something is wrong with me!. Use key bindings to search for words, translations, synonymous, local dictionaries, whatever. Use the tools your OS already have. Then, at the end, choose a formatter that fits you, or the one that your publisher ask you for, if any. I prefer troff than TeX/LaTeX. In my opinion, the latter has become a chaos. The last time I used it (more than a decade ago) it was still compiled by a generator of C code from pascal sources, and then the "distribution" grew from it like that story about alien plants from Creepshow. If you have to use it, I remember one distribution on Plan9, kerTeX IIRC, it was in unix also, way more compact. I prefer heirloom troff. Very small, very easy to use fonts and non English hyphenation and it feels more unix to me, I suppose it is just a matter of taste. The last time I was in the groff mailing list (they shared it nicely with heirloom troff users) they were working on a macro "mom" to make life easier to writers. I prefer using troff directly, but you can give it a try, it should be mature now. Make a script that creates an input for your formatter from your plain file, using your labels, spaces, etc, so if you need to use another formatter, you don't have to touch your work, just make another script. Just an advise. I enjoyed this book back at the time. Now is not only open, but you have also the groff source, so you can see how is the book itself developed. I think that you can pick a lot of good ideas from it, and it shows you how to use and combine the tools you already have, that is, the unix philosophy. https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/ P.S. I read someone recommending lilypond for typesetting music. The output is beautiful, and if you are familiar with lisp you'll be familiar with its guts. But I prefer these: This is a new version of RISC OS pms: https://sourceforge.net/p/philip-s-music-writer/ I discovered this some time ago by chance, and now I have to make a choice: http://www.Arkkra.com/ Both of them are small C programs, almost no dependencies, beautiful output and easy input syntax. Regards, adr
