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Introduction: Why a Text Editor instead of a Word Processor?

For many kinds of documents word processors are not the best tool for the job: long documents, documents like academic works that require careful organization, fiction and other long works of text all suffer at the hands of word processors. For that matter, only plain text can assure total compatibility between systems, as it is the lowest common denominator.

If you write fiction, poems, lengthy emails, or organized, long works, you may be well served by a text editor over a word processor. Word processors distract you with usually unnecessary options. Because your publisher is going to do the formatting, you will probably be requested to send in a document devoid of any mark up (bold, italics, etc.). And word processors can be distracting in their incessant highlighting of misspelled words that beg to be corrected before moving on - thus interrupting your train of thought. Word processors make you focus too much on the document as a document and distract you from what you should be doing, writing - being creative - producing text. Why worry about page breaks during the writing process? You should be dealing with that at the end, or not at all. In sum, text editors allow you to concentrate on writing, not formatting.2

Because text is so important to Unix, a tremendous number of powerful text editors are available to you, nearly always without charge. This document describes how to use one of them - emacs - to write. Its power in the hands of computer programmers is legendary. But it's a valuable ally for authors as well.


next up previous contents
Next: Setting Up Up: Introduction Previous: License and Version History   Contents
Randall Wood 2011-03-31