Hi all,
I’ve written an ode to Scrivener, among other things, in the following (long-ish) post about word-processing:
stevenpoole.net/blog/goodbye-cruel-word/
Hope you dig it. 
Cheers,
SP
Thank you! That’s a really interesting blog post (regardless of the Scrivener plug 
) anyway - I think a lot of folk just stick with Word because it is the standard. Nice picture of Word 5, too.
Best,
Keith
Ah, you reminded me to credit the screenshot properly.
Thanks, glad you found the piece interesting.
Best,
Steven
Ugh, and here I am struggling with Word today. Unfortunately, it’s still the best program for organising text tables easily (please tell me I’m wrong and that another program that I have missed is equally good at this). Teaching necessitates lots of tables for planning, timetables etc. The tables work nicely in Word - it’s just a shame that formatting anything is horrible and takes ages and that Word crashes on me every couple of hours. Grrr.
Oh, and what you said on your blog about how I implemented the square cursor because of user suggestion - the really nice thing about that is that I just wrote to Jesse, the creator of WriteRoom, and he sent me the code to do it, so he deserves all the credit for that.
All the best,
Keith
I think I have the good fortune never to have created a text table in Word. But have you checked out iWork 08? You might be able to do what you need in either Pages or Numbers, I dunno.
I’ll add a note to my post about Jesse giving you the cursor code - it’s a really nice story.
“Trigger Happy” is a great book, thanks for that one.
I’m sure this is not at all what you want to hear, but when I was teaching, I ended up setting my tables and other teaching materials using LaTeX. The learning curve was brutal, but once I got the hang of it, the predictability (i.e., no Word reformatting and repaginating my tables at random) saved me a lot of time and stress.
Keith wrote:
I’ve been playing with the new Pages in iWork 08 and it’s excellent. Prior to that
I used the table function in Nissus, which also allowed me to sidestep Word.
Thanks, BTW, Steven, for reminding me of the pleasures of Word 5.1. I’d be using
it today if it ran on a modern OS.
Tim
Site has been unavailable for me most of the day (day being Australian day, with it now being just after 5pm).
I assume it is just server trouble which will right itself (I will try back later), but thought you might have liked to know.
Matt
Steven’s post got linked off Daring Fireball, and from there lord knows where else. Probably just got b0rked by a traffic spike.
Yep, Daring Fireball, Digg and Reddit all simultaneously last night had my now ex-hosting company a bit red in the face. Should be fine now. (Fingers crossed.)
Typo: thanks, glad you liked it!
Finally got to read the blog.
I got halfway through and thought, “Unspeak”, I know that book!
So that makes 2 separate book recommendations in a thread that’s meant to be about Scrivener.
Matt