joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

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).