[TxMt] Re: Writing a Book with TextMate

Rick Gigger rick at alpinenetworking.com
Sat Jun 7 02:39:31 UTC 2008


So looking at your screenshot you have little green checkmarks on each  
file and folder, making it look like you have some sort version  
control plugin that is integrated with the file drawer.  I use the svn  
and git bundles but it doesn't update the drawer.  Am I missing  
something here?

Rick



On Jun 6, 2008, at 7:20 AM, John Laudun wrote:

>
> I *am* writing my current book in TextMate. I won't claim that my  
> way of doing it is *the* way, only the way that I am doing it.
>
> First, let me say that you'd be a fool not to look at Scrivener.  
> It's a great app. I just about bought it myself, but I had
>
> (1) already spent enough money on trail of the word processing grail
>
> and
>
> (2) begun to imagine myself enough of a geek to go it on my own  
> (e.g., I already had a way to play QT files from within textmate)
>
>
> I did, however, copy some ideas from Scrivener, as you'll see in the  
> layout of my project folder:
>
> <tm-boats.jpg>
>
>
> (For those who don't want the JPG:
>
> 	/boats
> 		/fieldwork
> 		/outputs
> 		/research
> 		/~mss
>
> )
>
> As you can see, the book is about boats -- crawfish boats in south  
> Louisiana (if you want to see a picture, there's one on the front  
> page of my website: http://johnlaudun.org/) -- and it's a nonfiction  
> work with different enough, to my mind, kinds of research that I  
> have it broken out into simply research and fieldwork. The tilde (~)  
> puts things at the top of Finder windows, but the bottom of TextMate  
> project drawers. (I don't care, as long as the part where I'm doing  
> writing is easy to find. I use MSS, for manuscript, instead of  
> draft, ymmv.)
>
> Most of the mss texts, as you can see, are in Markdown, but that's  
> really MultiMarkdown. I haven't begun to experiment with footnotes  
> just yet -- I'm still early enough in the drafting process that I  
> can play with reference schema -- and Fletcher's footnote  
> implementation is tenuous. (I'm taking a look at Maruku right now,  
> to see if there's anything to learn there.)
>
> I have heard the siren call of LaTeX several times now over the  
> years, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I like being able to  
> share my plain text files with non-markup-aware clients and  
> colleagues and that I can then generate RTF files out of them, which  
> is all publishers want. (Most will also take Word documents, but an  
> increasing number are going back to RTF, precisely because of having  
> to deal with Word's noting system is such a pain.)
>
> So there are writers who write with TextMate -- check out the  
> impressive ScreenMate some time! -- but I don't know if there's any  
> consensus. I, for one, wish I could go from MMD texts to RTF or PDF  
> with headers and/or footers, but I haven't found a convenient way  
> yet -- and I keep forgetting to see if I can get Prince working on  
> my MBP.
>
> I hope that helps.
>
> john
>
>
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