Pages - Word - Markdown
In preparation of the Rail Course I spent some time writing a couple of pages of “cheat sheets” or quick references of the materials presented. In the end, I got about 20 pages, mostly of short code snippets.
I also have a presentation to start things, and I did that in Keynote. Beautiful program and I think I managed to create a good presentation.
So the choice of the program to write the text was easy: Pages. At least that’s what I thought. But while Pages is quite simple to use, and it produces good looking pages, it is slow. Slow as molasses. Typing a character seems to pain the computer no end. After writing one or two pages I gave up in disgust and turned to Microsoft Word. The Mac version actually is quite good and I managed to write the 20 pages.
However, I want to check to uses subversion to do version control on my documents, so Word is not really a good option. That’s why I’m currently converting the Word file back to pure text, using John Grubers Markdown Syntax.
My texteditor of choice, Textmate, supports Markdown with one of it’s language bundles. It understands the basic syntax things, allows for drag and drop of images to the text (converting them to correct Markdown links) and a preview of the final result. Best of all, it’s text only and not any kind of proprietary format.
Simple things are a good thing.