I often code HTML and I never use WYSIWYG Editors. Especially since professional web sites are usually dynamic, there is almost no benefit in using them. Coding a template with style sheets is just quicker in a good text editor. And of course the text editor is where I do all the other coding too.

Just as clumsy as the heavy weight WYSIWYG HTML Editors from AdobeMacromedia I find word processors like MS Word and worse even Apple Works. Apple’s new Software Pages seems even heavier. That is why I try to get away from them as much as possible. For some tasks however the layout features of RTF are just not enough. The question is, what software to use for letters, offers, invoices and all kinds of correspondence where email is not accepted. Testing a whole bunch of word processors would be useless. Even if I would find one, it would probably save files in some strange format that no one else uses. Worse even, the software could disappear after a while and I would be stuck with files in a format that I can’t read.

When my annoyance with Apple Works peaked (2 years ago), I started looking for some way to at least do my invoices without Word or Works. I found a small billing software that would export invoices as plain text or RTF. In order to format my invoices better, I created HTML Templates that would also work (not smoothly though, because the author of the program did not really seem to agree with me, that HTML was a cool output format for invoices – I manually had to change file endings every time I used it).

Then I noticed that working in the billing Software wasn’t really comfortable either. Also, most of the functions I never needed and whenever there was an update there was a risk that my templates wouldn’t work. I had no desire to reprogram the whole thing myself.

So I continued using my HTML Templates for a while, filling in numbers and Texts manually. This seems ridiculous, but it was the least annoying way so far.

Last week I came across NVU, a standalone version of the good old Mozilla Composer, an open source WYSIWYG editor. I tested it with my invoices and it felt quite comfortable. It has a spellchecker (in many languages) and works in many ways like one would expect of a lightweight word processor. And the file format couldn’t be more standard: HTML

I think bundling NVU with a couple of simple Templates for private and business correspondence as well optimizing some functions for this new group of users would actually give most people just what they need for writing texts. Of course some knowledge of HTML is still good when working with it, but I think that some principle of HTML and CSS would suffice. The best is that even if nobody agrees with me I’m still on the save side: HTML will stick around for a while.

In Mac OS X there is also a very nice feature that allows saving as PDF from the print menu. That way one has a second very well established format for exchanging documents (especially when they include images).

Despite the fact that I am not a heavy traveller and that when I travel I usually don’t go to exotic places, it seems that most of my posts are about traveling. One would expect that western Europe is one of the places in the world where traveling is most convenient: In most european countries there is a tight net of public transport and due to cheap flights to places where you would often not even expect an airport,it has become quite affordable to operate on a european scale (even for a very stereotypical Berlin based freelancer like myself).

I happen to have a client in Eindhoven, home of Philips and PSV. Instead of staying in Hotel I sometimes prefer to stay with friends in Cologne. It looks pretty near on the map and comparing the local accents of Dutch / German in both places, it sounds pretty near too. You would think that commuting between the cities is no problem. The truth is being in / waiting for trains in Mönchengladbach and Venlo makes you feel like you’re in a Kaurismäki movie or like you’re trying to cross the Austrian / Czech Border somewhere in Waldviertel in 1993 – only without the prostitutes and chinese merchants selling underwear and nuclear fire crackers. The trains also look like they were bought from one of the former socialist countries (maybe Deutsche Bahn got them in return for second hand cars).

Waiting at the station in Venlo I notice that the second hand of the station clock always pauses at the full minute. Concluding that all other seconds must be either shortened or at least one second must be dropped I start counting the seconds. 5 minutes after your train is scheduled you hear a message that it got cancelled all together and that it has been replaced with a bus. In front of the station is a bus labeled “Schulbus” waiting. All of a sudden there is huge crowed and everybody fights to get on the bus. The negotiations take a good 15 minutes. You hear people complaining that the bus always takes more than an hour to the place the you would get to in 20 minutes by train – if there was one. Obviously this happens frequently.

I sit opposite of a guy who mashes a beer can. “Hier kann man die noch kaputt machen – kein Pfand”. He shouts to the driver who just started the engine “Fahr los Jupp!”. The Driver shouts back from beyond the crowd standing in the corridor “Mach ich, Boss”. The Boss offers a beer to a german speaking Dutch girl with a lip piercing in the seat behind his seat. She looks at me showing her amusement. The Boss asks me where I go. I tell him I have to catch a flight at Köln-Bonn Airport. He says that he also took a flight once and asks the guy next to him, if he ever took flight. The guy nods. He asks the girl with the piercing where she was going. “Remmscheid, mein Freund wohnt da.” – “Remmscheid kenn ich, da war ich Knast.” I fight to not show my amusement. Somebody shouts that the air inlet in the ceiling should be opened. The Boss agrees. A woman fails to open it onthe first attempt. “Jo Mutti, drücken” he encourages the woman who is well in her 40s. “bin keine Mutti” – “wie? immer noch nicht?”.

The boss tells us that he goes shopping to the netherlands, because Aldi is much better and cheaper there: “Magarine für 17 ct – wo gibts das noch in Deutschland.” He makes his neighbor help him to get a huge Aldi shopping back up from somewhere between all the squeezed in feet and gets a box out: “Muscheln.” That was supposed to be his dinner and now he’s stuck in this.

In the middle of a monologue about how germany should legalize dope and how things would get better in the country if there were coffee shops spreading in Germany he shouts: “Man, wir sind ja schon in Viersen, da ist ja schon das Teppich Paradies”.

I get off the bus my train has left. There is one one hour later, which turns out to be ten minutes late. In Mönchengladbach I miss another train, because it leaves from a different platform than indicated. The next one, again one hour later, is 5 min late. It is should arrive at the Köln-Bonn airport at 19:49 h. I get there at 19:57, my flight is scheduled for 20:15 h. I take the chance to get some workout and do an orientation run: train station – terminal 2 – terminal 1 – terminal 2. My flight is 45 min late and they let me check in at 20:10 h.