I really like LaTeX. So much so that I bought a used copy of the original LaTeX “blue book” just so I could write a class file to print my freshman English papers in MLA format, which requires breaking most of the typesetting rules that make LaTeX output look so professional to begin with.

But there’s no question about the ugliness of LaTeX (or plain TeX) source. At times it borders on incomprehensible. LyX helps, but only if you like LyX’s editor.

When I was an office temp I saw dozens of people struggle to typset 100+ page documents in Microsoft Word. Word is a pretty powerful tool, but it’s just not up to the task. Small, maddening inconsistencies appear that are difficult to correct. Large documents require a lot of memory and cause crashes. And when you have multiple people working on the same document, only one of whom understands how to use styles properly, it becomes nightmarish.

The trouble with WYSIWYG is that what you see is all you get. Why should an author — who should only be thinking about the content, not the presentation — be faced with decisions about line and page breaks while working on a first draft?

So here’s what I want: an editor that looks and feels like Microsoft Word, but that only permits structural editing — section headings, emphasis, etc. Then use TeX or a similar typesetting system to generate printed documents. To make this useful to a general audience, one would also need a “style editor” to modify the behavior of the typesetter.

The problem with this is that the idea of “structural editing” seems quite alien to a lot of computer users. People like WYSIWYG. They want to work on screen with something that looks like a finished document. I believe this is actually a very inefficient way to work, since one is distracted by formatting concerns from the actual writing, but I don’t know how to convince anyone else of this. But if the “structural editor” could be styled to match the user’s expectations of what the final document will look like, we could have the best of both worlds. Writers will be able to work in an environment they already know and feel comfortable with, and editors and publishers will be spared the frustration of fixing formatting inconsistencies introduced by writers.

I just started playing with this, and already I love it: Zotero. It’s like a bookmark manager crossed with a note-taking program crossed with BibTeX.

Zotero is an extension that runs inside Firefox 2.0 — click the icon, and it captures a complete bibliographic record of the page you’re looking at, and saves a copy. This is vital when you need to cite web pages that may not be permanent.

Even better, it has scrapers (they call them “translators”) for a bunch of online databases, the kind you get in university libraries. Say you’re reading the online PDF version of an article that appeared in a journal. Click on Zotero, and it saves the PDF then stores both the URL and the journal name, volume, number, page, author, title, etc. Then click another button and it spits out a bibliography in APA, MLA, or Chicago form.

It works for offline resources too. Look up a book in a card catalog, and click to record the bibliography. Add your own notes and links to files on your hard drive. Of course, it has a search function, with tagging promised in future release. It’s open-source.

Unlike the cool-but-geeky note-taking programs (like desktop Wikis), Zotero is designed for scholarly work, and it has some big-name research institutions behind it. Here’s hoping it continues to grow.

When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. Every day, after I couldn’t put it off any longer, I would sit down and practice a piece of music. Whenever I made a mistake, I would stop, go back to a point just before the mistake, and start again. The problem with this technique was that I never learned to play anything all the way through without stopping. Even if I didn’t make a mistake, I would automatically stop and repeat the difficult parts several times before continuing. This became an ingrained habit that took ages to break.

A few years later, my family bought a PC, which I used to type my school assignments. Like everyone else in the world, I quickly discovered how easy it was to edit on the screen. No messing about with white-out or correction tape, just “backspace” and start again. I learned to type on a computer, so I never learned to type without the crutch of a backspace key. For a long time after that, I automatically hit the backspace key after certain words I typically mistyped, even if I had typed them correctly.

Now I have a modern word processing application which will check my spelling, grammar, capitalization, and even my formatting while I type. One would think this would leave me free to concentrate better on the writing itself, but I find the reverse is true. All those little red squiggles distract me from the words I’ve written. I don’t care if my words are misspelled until I’m finished writing and into the editing phase.

I think today’s word processors are too focused on the editing phase, and their “helpful” distractions make it more difficult to write coherent prose that flows logically from one sentence to the next. I find myself falling into a stacatto, disjointed pattern of short sentences and disconnected paragraphs, more like an outline than prose.

Gary King wrote recently, “It’s up to us to ensure that the tools we use are optimizing the important tasks, not the trivial ones.” That’s why when I want to get any serious writing done, I launch Emacs full-screen.