April 9, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

Handwriting until recently has been a problem for me.  My fourth grade teacher saw my previous grades on the subject and gave me time to work on a typewriter.  I struggled in high school German because a teacher insisted on handwritten assignments.

About three years ago, I discovered a great book on italic writing and havn’t looked back.  Also reading caligraphy books that focus on fundamental strokes rather than letter shapes has also done a great deal to improve my writing style.  Just my thoughts on how to improve handwriting.
First, get a pen with good flow. Whenever I use a cheap pasty ball-point bic, I feel like I have to fight the pen just to get a good line. Fountain pens are great, if you want to put out $30-100 dollars and can trust yourself with them. Othewise, gel-pens, roller ball, or even fine-tipped art markers are good.

Second, do most of your writing on a good comfortable writing surface. I hate using many lecture-hall flip-out desks because they are too small, the wrong position, and the wrong angle. If you can grab a table, do it.

Spend some time every day practicing zig-zags, loops, and arches. Don’t try to conform to the template suggested by anyone else. Focus on consistency of angle, shape and spacing. If you are bored during a class, scribble out a few lines of zig-zags and loops. Your goal is to develop good muscle memory for the fundamental strokes used to build the letters. IME practicing strokes offers better gain for time invested. You can spend a half-hour working on the lowercase “r,” or you can spend a half-hour working on the short-down-stroke used in ‘agijpqru.’ Counter-clockwise loops are used to build ‘acdegoq.’

Finally, a thing that really helped me improve my handwriting was to not worry about ligatures (light strokes that connect letters). Some advise no ligatures, some styles demand lifting the pen only between words. Personally, I let ligatures appear where they are natural. And use a pen lift where it feels natural.

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January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

My complaints about Microsoft Word are rather legendary among my friends. I use Microsoft Word when required by clients or contacts. But I find it doesn’t well support my needs as a writer, often gets in my way, produces documents in formats that are unusable by the rest of my system, and is overkill for many of my needs.

About once a year, I go looking for a possible alternative or replacement. For compatibility openoffice.org and the OS X version NeoOffice provide the ability to import and export many MSWord documents and also export to the OASIS open document format (ODF). However, the openoffice and NeoOffice writing environment brings with it much of the frustrations I have with MSWord. NeoOffice also opens and runs sluggish on every system I have used it.

I craft my dissertation using LaTeX. LaTeX supports a number of critical itches I have. First, focus on the words and structure of a document rather than the appearance. Second, push off the final decisions about appearance to the stylesheet. Third, offer rich support for bibliographic citations, endnotes, indexing, floating diagrams and cross references. Fourth, output beautiful well-formatted PDF.

LaTeX fails though when it comes to the ability to convert between different document types. Existing document conversion tools such as tex4ht cannot handle the stylesheet I use for my dissertation, and the conversion process of LaTeX to MSWord or ODF is going to be painful. Ideally, something like DocBook is going to be a good solution but it’s not quite there either.

Once upon a time, I was a big fan of Nisus. Nisus just announced Nisus Writer Pro which might be worth trying when it is released. Another alternative I look at now and then is Mellel which offers better structured writing support.

Still however, it seems that the best workflow for now is to use a text editor such as emacs and deal with the formatting later.

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