Re: How do people do this?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 03:09:31PM +1000 or thereabouts, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> I am wondering how people approach writing their GNOME documents (and
> anything else they do involving Docbook style markup). This is more idle
> curiosity than anything else.

If it's short or similar to something I've done before, I have 
an idea of how to structure it in my head. If it's longer or
different, I do as my teachers always told me to do in exams:
"write an essay plan first". And draw lots of lines and big
number 1, 2, 3 marks over what should come where. Until I
have an idea of the structure.

I have a series of files in a directory called Templates. They
have names like artheader.sgml and orderedlist.sgml and so on,
so you can guess that they are empty skeletons.

I whack the artheader.sgml (yeah, needs fixing in its name and
some content) into my new file, fill it in, and then just continue
writing and marking up as I go.

If there is something like an obvious list I am going to need,
I include that file, but otherwise it's all with a text editor
and doing the tags by hand. The one thing I could wish for is
that if I do 
 <sometag>blah blah
and then hit 
 </
that it would complete the end of sometag.

Because I don't know how to do this in joe and because joe and
gnome-terminal have cut and paste issues, I am trying to teach
myself vim: there are many more people who use vim macros than
there are people who write joe macros so I hope to steal madly.

This rather clunky process imposes structure on my rather 
unstructured thoughts. If it's just not going well, I stop 
and work out what I'm actually trying to say. At that stage 
I start scribbling notes on index cards and shuffling them 
around on a table to see what is the most logical structure

(I hear tell of 'folding editors', but I like my index cards;
or back of used printer paper; or envelopes from junk mail
on a table. I will admit it can get out of hand though. Doing 
the Gnome 1.2 FAQ a year or more ago, I had them all over the 
floor and we had to find the remote control for the television 
because you couldn't walk to it to turn it on without treading 
on questions and answers.)

> Also, I find the markup phase to be mind-numbingly boring. Honestly, I
> would rather clean my apartment than markup documents sometimes and I
> suspect that this stops me writing more than I do (this is _not_ a quiet
> plea for help, since I don't think anybody would _enjoy_ doing the
> markup).

I think some people do, actually. I quite enjoy mindless markup
when I don't want to think too hard. Of course, your documents
tend to make excursions into areas where I'd have to think :) 
(Marking up C involves a lot of recourse to references and to
any hacker I can grab :)) 

> What do other people do? Does the final editing process just suck for
> everybody, or am I missing some cool technique?

The final editing process sucks for me, sure. I loathe the last
few steps, because they never _are_ the last few steps after all.

Telsa