ir0b0t's Journal: Open Source Law Office: WYSWYG v. command line redux

In the ongoing adventure that running my office with open source code has become, I've set aside Samba, SSH and PGP questions for the time being to consider a more philosophical question.

The question is whether its better to use wyswyg word processing or to consider using only raw text.

I was raised on the MacIntosh and the GUI and was allergic to the command line until very recently. It never occurred to me to use a text editor for the high volume of heavily formatted documents I produced each day. I didn't even know why anyone would use a text editor because I only conceived of writing in the context of writing research papers or letters.

I don't know how to write scripts, but if scripts can edit lines and lines of code with programs like grep, sed and awk, then why not a court document? I could start emacs, type what I wanted and then format it in TeX mode.

Surprisingly I've found no scripts for legal documents. There are scripts for academic formatting and some business formatting. Scripts for legal formatting are nowhere to be found.

It would be tough to evaluate whether the scripted approach would really improve on the wyswyg approach. I'm intrigued though. I end up using plain text to move documents files between different flavors and versions of word processor. It takes a lot of time.

It might be a lot easier to just stick to the raw text suitable for any word processor until its clear what formatting is needed and which program is going to be doing the formatting.