Desktop Linux for Everyone
This is a cool workflow post. It’s a great time to be a writer, though. The tools are great. It’s more-than-viable to write a book using Linux/Unix/pretty-much-any-open-source-tool-you-want.
FYI, here was my Linux book-writing workflow. I miss using Asciidoc!
Writing a Book with Unix | Joe M.
This isn’t strictly Linux-related, but it is related to openness. I spent the past year as part of a team training students to evaluate textbooks. The goal of the project was to get student voices in the mix for Open Education Resources.
The toolkit we used for this project is ready and we put it up on GitHub, with the hope that others will use our work. I’m posting this here 1) out of pride and 2) to reach open-minded educators.
textbook-evaluation-toolkit | GitHub
Pandoc always seems like magic to me. The syntax feels inscrutable, though. I’m grateful Opensource.com made this neat Pandoc cheat sheet. I have copies of it at home and at work.
Convert files at the command line with Pandoc | Opensource.com
I’ve played with this a few times, and I love the concept, but for slides—which need to be graphical to keep from boring people to death—a graphical interface is a much quicker, easier way to build a deck.
This is a great project, though. I’m very open to anything that explores different ways to build slides.
Joseph is a great example of why Linux is so important. He obviously knows how he wants his computer to work and Linux lets him craft an environment that works in exactly that way. I tend to focus on academics, because I work in academia, but I think anyone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer, as academics do, has a personal relationship with their machine. Linux lets us personalize our work spaces. And personalized work spaces make for happy (and productive) users.
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I’m Joseph Reagle, an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. My latest book, Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web, was published in April 2015 by The MIT Press. I also published Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia in 2010. I’m currently working on life hacking and geek feminism topics.
I first encountered Linux around 1993, at about the same time I created my first Web page. I was a computer science student, and I remember downloading it on to about 40 3.5″ floppy disks and taking it home where my brother and I installed it on our PC. It was great to have multiple terminals available on your own PC: I could have a news reader (trn), email client (pine), editor (Emacs), and a compiler running concurrently. Back then, it was quite a challenge to get X working, I still have nightmares about editing modeline files, but it was a delight to finally see those xeyes!
Since then, GNU/Linux has been the most hospitable environment for doing the things the way I’m used to.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
My choice was influenced by my colleagues at the W3C. Initially, I used a really nice Windows workstation Philip DesAutels wrangled for me—and I remember being scolded by Richard Stallman! A few years later, Daniel Veillard mounted a campaign in favor of Red Hat. When he left to go work there, I followed the lead of the systems guys (like Eric Prud’hommeaux and Hugo Haas) towards Debian. At some point, I noticed that whenever I went to the Web with a question, I ended up in the Ubuntu forums. The distribution was relatively current, easy to use, and the community was great. I’m now running Kubuntu 14.04 LTS.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I’ve been using KDE since some version of 1.0 . I used to experiment with other environments but I no longer like to tinker. I just want it to work the way I expect.
One of my great frustrations is my dependence on speech recognition. There was a brief time, around 1999, when IBM’s ViaVoice was available on Linux. But since then, I’ve been dependent on running some version of Dragon in a virtualized Windows environment. Speech recognition is now getting to be pretty good on Macs (via Dragon and natively), so I’m considering that as an option. I had high hopes for the KDE Simon project but it’s no longer active.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so
important?
Package management (apt-get) is the thing that really sets GNU/Linux distributions apart from anything else.
Otherwise, I love Zim wiki. It is cross platform (it works well on Windows and is a bit creaky on OS X), but it first emerged in the Linux sphere. I also rely upon the Freemind mindmapper. I write everything in markdown, and use pandoc to produce syllabi, lectures, papers, and books.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
Nothing too special. A Dell Vostro 270s at home and a System76 Wild Dog Performance at work.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Better yet, here’s a screencast of some tools I use for research and writing.
Interview conducted November 19, 2015
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
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I now have versions of my old Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian columns in my college’s institutional respository, Academic Works. I thought I’d link to them here since I’ve mentioned them before, but only had a limited number of downloads to offer.
So I’m writing a book about Linux.
You’ll hear a lot more about this over the next few months, but one of the most interesting things I’ve discovered is Asciidoc, which is a fantastically thorough markup language for writing books. It’s like Markdown with even more options, like sidebars, notes, and tables. Asciidoc lets you just type, with very simple syntax controlling the formatting.
When I first started writing the book, I was using Word style sheets with LibreOffice. Manning, my publisher, offered .odt versions for OpenOffice, but I had trouble getting the styles to work. Ironically, I wound up using the Word .docx template, which worked best with LibreOffice. But the big problem was images—they just wouldn’t embed correctly. I was spending a decent chunk of time formatting when I needed to be writing.
Comments were also tough to parse. Jim Whitehurst actually got LibreOffice patched to better handle them while he was writing his book.
After a couple of chapters of fighting through the template, my editor suggested we switch to Asciidoc and my life instantly became easier.
With LibreOffice, I had to insert an image, number it, caption it, style it, and then hope that everything held together, while with Asciidoc, I just write something like this:
.Mint's Software Manager has a similar look to the Ubuntu Software Center.
image::../images/08_11.png[]
and Asciidoc handles everything else for me, even numbering the images in the captions.
This is what the above code renders as:
Asciidoc transformed into a PDF
A sidebar or note is as simple as something like this:
Asciidoc syntax for a note
which turns it into this:
Asciidoc syntax for a note rendered into a PDF
Asciidoc has formatting for heads and subheads and even automatically generates a table of contents based on them:
Asciidoc generates a table of contents automatically
You can write Asciidoc in anything since it’s just text, but I like to preview the code to make sure everything looks OK. There’s a gedit plugin but it seemed to require some work to get going and I was under the gun with deadlines, so I decided to use Atom, the GitHub-created text/code editor. It had a plugin that rendered Asciidoc. I wrote a few chapters with it, but the preview was sometimes peculiar. Notes and sidebars would expand into the whole document. Also, I couldn’t directly open Asciidoc formatted documents with it. Instead, I had to open Atom and then open a document via the Atom open menu.
Atom was fine, but annoying enough that I decided to try Brackets, the Adobe open-source code/text editor. It renders Asciidoc much better and while opening Asciidoc files still isn’t seamless, it’s better than Atom. I wish it had a running spellcheck instead of the ability to run a spellcheck when you’re done, but it previews what I need to see and gives me a running word count, so I’m pretty happy.
The Brackets text editor
Asciidoc rendered by Brackets
Brackets and Atom render in HTML but the a2x command (it’s part of the Asciidoc package) makes it very easy to convert the .adoc file to a PDF (although there’s some weird bug that causes the transformation to fail when image files have a period in the name). The output looks like a professionally formatted book chapter.
Asciidoc has been a life-saver for me. I’m lucky to be working with a publisher that uses it. I think it has applications for anyone who needs nice-looking PDFs or someone self-publishing. I also think it has tremendous implications for open education resources in that it allows someone to write a textbook without necessarily having to format it. You’d have a PDF ready very easily but you could still make the underlying Asciidoc available to people who wanted to modify the original work.
Markup languages like Asciidoc are fantastic for people like me who don’t want to deal with formatting. It’s saved me hours on the book (once we moved to Asciidoc, we were also able to use a private git repository to submit drafts back and forth; Asciidoc also has the ability to comment-out text which lets us share comments in the text) and allows me to focus on writing and not on styles and formatting. I’m not sure if Asciidoc has wide appeal for everyone, but if there’s a chance you can use it to move your work forward, I encourage you to spend some time with it.
Jeff Atwood is trying to create a new Markdown standard/specification. There’s been some drama. Some people like the concept. And some people don’t.
I like Markdown. I think it works but it could be better, so I’m keeping an eye on the spec. But I’m also worried Markdown has been in the wild too long for anyone to really tame it now.
My most recent Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian column, which may be of some interest since it’s about Markdown.
Very much inspired by my interview with Bryan Behrenshausen, I’ve been spending a lot more time working with Markdown. Day-to-day, at work and at home, I usually work with either HTML or word processed documents. I’m fast with HTML and proficient with word processors, and I rarely need to convert one to the other, but I liked the idea of simplifying my process and using Markdown for everything, with pandoc to convert it.
Markdown is simple enough, but there is a learning curve, so while one of the advantages of it is that it doesn’t require any kind of special editor, the reality is that I needed something with a preview so I could make sure my syntax looked OK (which it often did not). As a result, I went through a few Markdown editors, trying to find the one I like best (and because I love a good rabbit hole).
I eventually narrowed my list to three: ReText, UberWriter, and gedit-markdown. When choosing software, I can usually tell if something will work for me in the first hour or so of use. All three of these editors were very usable to me, which is why I wound up needing a bake-off. I still haven’t really picked one, although I do spend the most time in gedit, mostly because it’s where I do everything. And even as I’ve gotten a handle on Markdown, I appreciate the preview all three provide, just to get a sense of how the final product will look.
ReText
ReText is simple. It’s just a text window. It has a spellcheck and a live preview. It lets you natively export to HTML, ODT, or PDF. It also lets you grab the HTML as source. There’s not much to it, which I see as a feature. My main issue with it is that it’s black text on white background and I prefer white text on a dark background. There’s a CSS file that can be tweaked, but I haven’t explored that part of ReText yet. Also, Linux Setup interviewee Amy Cavender is a ReText user.
ReText
UberWriter
UberWriter is beautiful (as I’ve mentioned before). It’s got the same basic export options as ReText, plus an advanced export menu I’ve never had to use. It has a spellcheck, a running word count, and a dark mode. It also lets you copy the Markdown into HTML without having to do a formal export, which is a nice feature. There’s also a focus mode, which puts an emphasis on your current line and de-emphasizes previous ones. It’s great, but I have a few issues with UberWriter. One is that it doesn’t remember the dark color scheme — it has to be set each time it’s open. I think it’s under review as a feature, though. There’s also no search and replace ability, although that’s also on the roadmap. Another issue is that there’s no preview for me, which I believe is because I’m on Ubuntu 12.04 and there’s some kind of dependency issue (I’m not sure it’s supported for 12.04, although it runs fine otherwise). UberWriter is $5 through the Ubuntu Software Center and despite those few issues, it’s well worth the money.
UberWriter
gedit-markdown
gedit-markdown is gedit with a preview window. The preview isn’t live — you have to manually update it, but other than that, it does everything gedit does, which for me, a gedit lover is a nice thing. I assumed that as I got used to Markdown (it’s really not super complicated), I’d just phase out the preview window, but it’s actually proven to be very helpful to me, just in terms of checking the formatting of stuff I’m writing.
gedit-markdown
So for now, I’m sticking with gedit for my Markdown needs, although I’m keeping an eye on UberWriter, simply because it has a great look and feel and seems to be continually improved. But ReText is also a strong option for anyone who wants a simple Markdown editor.
A final note. At work, on Windows 7, I’ve been using MarkdownPad. It’s great. It has live preview and easily exports HTML — it even has a copy code as HTML function that converts Markdown to HTML on the fly. It doesn’t export into any kind of word processed format, so you need pandoc if you’re going to use it for that sort of thing. If you’re stuck in Windows, MarkdownPad is a great option. I’ve been using it for all kinds of writing, from articles to blog posts.
MarkPad
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