tadhg.com » writing

“Let’s Enhance”

Tadhg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:29:16 +0000

A particularly inane trope:

In case the point isn’t crystal clear: you can’t do that. There are no image enhancement programs that let you know what the data missing at the point of capture is.

There appear to be plenty of people who think this kind of thing isn’t just possible but trivial (people who have “chosen to be smart at other things”, perhaps), at least judging by the amount of times it comes up on Clients From Hell.

I’m prepared to cut Star Trek and Blade Runner, and to a lesser extent Battlestar Galactica, some slack given that they’re science fiction, and we don’t actually know what the software capabilities or the capture format was. In Blade Runner, my interpretation of that scene is that what Deckard has his computer system analyze isn’t a simple photo, but rather some kind of hologram with a much larger amount of stored information than is apparent.

The other clips, however, deserve nothing but scorn and have no excuse. The fact that it’s doing the impossible is one thing, and then there’s also the fact that it’s a completely tired idea that exemplifies bad, lazy writing.

Put aside the first consideration for a moment and assume that this kind of technology is commonplace—you wouldn’t have characters reacting the way they do in these scenes. Either the person responsible for the analysis would simply do it themselves, or, nobody would be impressed at all by the fact that it’s possible. Instead, here you get a mixture, as if the technology exists but somehow the character is a total genius for thinking of using it.

Note that some forms of enhancement are possible; if you get a blurry shot of a license plate, it’s theoretically possible to use probabilistic analysis to get the letters or numbers, because you know in advance what the possible answers are. But that’s very different from what’s shown in those clips.

Also note: this post is not meant to imply that any other aspects of the shows referenced above are necessarily more realistic in any way.

Tags: humor, science-fiction, technology, television, video, writing

The Unfeasibly Tall GBBMCSMB

Tadhg — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:50:02 +0000

I’ve always had a soft spot for good genre parody, regardless of genre, and The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire’s Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride is pretty damn hilarious. You can read the first chapter in HTML, or the whole thing at Scribd.

Tags: genre, humor, parody, reading, writing

First Post With Vim

Tadhg — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 04:05:48 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hacking away on scripts to customize Vim, replicating the scripts I made for jEdit. I’m more or less done, and this blog post is being written in MacVim. This hopefully means that when I’m done with it I’ll be able to publish it from within Vim, the same as with jEdit.

Writing scripts for Vim has been rather different from writing them for jEdit. jEdit is an editor with a robust API; Vim is an editor that kind of gives the user access to the API all the time, via keyboard commands, and scripting for it often consists of simply passing keystrokes. As an example, this is the Jython code for getting the current selection in a jEdit macro:

text = init.textArea.getSelectedText()

This is the Python for getting the current visual selection in Vim:

self.vim.command('normal gv"wygv')
self.vim.command("let tvar = getreg(’t’)")
text = unicode(self.vim.eval("tvar"), "utf-8")

From a programming perspective, jEdit is clearly a lot nicer to deal with.

I have two primary reasons for making the switch:

Future proofing: I couldn’t switch to the various pre-release versions of jEdit 4.3 because I couldn’t get my Jython scripts to work with them, and that made me worry that there simply weren’t enough people scripting jEdit in Python to make it likely that the plugin allowing Jython macros would be supported. Given how useful my scripts are, that would have trapped me with jEdit 4.2, or some future version, if support for JythonInterpreter flagged. Vim, on the other hand, seems to have a lot of people scripting for it in Python, and I don’t see Python support simply disappearing anytime soon with a new release.
Power/speed: I’m someone who’s quite inclined towards keyboard shortcuts in all applications, and this means Vim should be a highly efficient environment.
Mentality: Related to the previous point, I think that being able to manipulate text more powerfully will reinforce the approach of scripting as many steps as possible, rather than doing them (no matter how efficiently) manually. Even over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that I’m more inclined to write scripts than to put up with various manual steps in my daily workflow.

So far I’ve mainly worked to replicate my jEdit setup in Vim, with a few small improvements here and there; the largest one is probably the live word count, which means that I can glance at the status line to see the current word count instead of having to select the text to be counted and then invoke the word counter. I’ve also tweaked it so it only counts the relevant parts of the document—for example, in this blog post, it doesn’t count the title or the datestamp.

I don’t intend to abandon jEdit, and have a feeling that I’ll use it for various things here and there, but I’ve switched over the Vim for the majority of my writing and programming.

Tags: coding, Jython, python, software, tech, text editing, Vim, writing

Better Word Count in Vim

Tadhg — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:40:14 +0000

I’m currently trying out Vim (again), and have made more progress this time, mainly due to Seth’s help. The key things that have made it better:

:set hidden. Absolutely critical, this. Stops Vim from complaining when you try to switch buffers and your current buffer has unsaved changes.
bufexplorer. Makes switching buffers a lot easier.
A better Python syntax file. I didn’t like the defaults.
My own indentation and syntax files for reStructuredText.

Really, though, the key first one was :set hidden. Before that I felt that I had completely misunderstood Vim’s file management model.

Once I got the syntax highlighting to a reasonable state, I ported my word count macro over to Vim. This wasn’t too hard after the inevitable character encoding problems. For working within Vim scripts, I strongly suggest using the following:

ulines = [unicode(line, "utf-8") for line in vim.current.buffer]

(Assuming your Vim encoding is set to UTF-8, of course.)

The Vim version of my script isn’t as versatile yet as the jEdit version, because I don’t know how to make it work with only selected lines (something that’s easy in jEdit). Apart from that, though, it seems to work quite well; the next version of it might do “live” word count in the status bar.

I’m currently writing this in Vim, or kind of: the actual writing is in Vim, but the creation of the file and the template, the automated expansion of various reStructuredText entities, output to reStructuredText, and the publication, are in jEdit as I haven’t ported those over yet.

The script:

function! WordCount()
python << EOF
import re
import vim

class WordCounter(object):
    """
    Vim script for better word count.
    """

    LINE_SEPARATORS = (
        "\r",
        "\n"
    )

    WORD_SEPARATORS = (
        " ",        # space
        "\t",       # tab
        "/",        # slash
        "&",        # ampersand
        ’"’,        # double quotation mark, straight
        u"\u201C",  # double quotation mark, left
        u"\u201D",  # double quotation mark, right
        u"\u2018",  # single quotation mark, left
        u"\u2013",  # en dash
        u"\u2014",  # em dash
        ">",        # greater than symbol
        "<",        # less than symbol
        "+",        # plus
        "=",        # equals
    )

    REPEATER_SEPARATORS = (
    #These are only separators if they’re present consecutively, e.g. -- or ..
        "-",
        "."
    )

    IGNORE = (
    #Not separators per se, but should not be treated as word content
        "’",        # single quotation mark, straight
        u"\u2019",  # single quotation mark, right
        "(",        # left parenthesis
        ")",        # right parenthesis
        "[",        # left bracket
        "]",        # right bracket
        "{",        # left curly bracket
        "}",        # right curly bracket
        "|",        # bar
        "-",        # hyphen
        "#",        # hash mark
        ".",        # period
        "_",        # underscore
        "`",        # backtick
        "\\",        # backslash
    )

    def word_count(self):

        ulines = [unicode(line, "utf-8") for line in vim.current.buffer]
        text = u"\n".join(ulines)

        chars = len(text) #Pretty sure I want the actual char count, not the adjusted char count.

        text = self.remove_directives(text)
        text = self.adjust_for_rest(text)
        words, lines = self.count_words(text)

        print "chars: %s, words: %s, lines: %s" % (chars, words, lines)

    def remove_directives(self, text):
        textlines = text.split("\n")
        newlines = []
        comment = re.compile(r"[ ]*\.\. [a-zA-Z0-9_\|]")
        argument = re.compile(r"    :[^\:]*:")
        for line in textlines:
            if not comment.match(line) and not argument.match(line):
                newlines.append(line)
        return "\n".join(newlines)

    def adjust_for_rest(self, text):
        """
            Go through each of the special cases for reST.
        """
        text = self.rest_adjust_pipe_space(text)

        return text

    def rest_adjust_pipe_space(self, text):
        """
            Special-case "|\ " to make sure e.g. "|Hypnotic Specter|\ s"
            doesn’t get counted as three words.

            |Incinerate|\ s |Hypnotic Specter|\ —|Hypnotic Specter|\ s
            The above line should be counted as five words.
        """
        spacere = re.compile(r"\|\\ ([^ ]{1})")
        finds = spacere.findall(text)
        text = spacere.sub("|\g<1>", text)
        return text

    def count_words(self, text):
        words, lines = 0, 1
        #go through the text character by character:
        word, previous_character = 0, None
        for character in text:
            if character in (self.LINE_SEPARATORS + self.WORD_SEPARATORS) or (character in self.REPEATER_SEPARATORS and previous_character in self.REPEATER_SEPARATORS):
                #it’s a separator
                word = 0
                if character in (self.LINE_SEPARATORS):
                    lines = lines + 1
            elif character in (self.IGNORE):
                pass
            else:
                #it’s part of a word.
                if not word:
                    words = words + 1
                    word = 1
            previous_character = character

        return (words, lines)

WordCounter().word_count()
EOF
endfunction

if !exists(":WW")
  command! WW  :call WordCount()
endif

Tags: coding, Jython, python, software, tech, text editing, Vim, writing

2010 Goals

Tadhg — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:53:36 +0000

Happy New Year!

Once again, my goals for the coming year.

Some of these recur from last year, but that’s okay. They’re not really in any order.

Write at least one draft of the fantasy novel.
Revive sfmagic.org. Many of my MTG-playing friends simply don’t believe I’ll ever do this one, but I’m still determined to make it happen, and right now there are fewer obstacles to doing it than there have been in years.
Celebrate my birthday. A strange-sounding resolution, perhaps, but I haven’t actually done any significant celebration of my birthday for a couple of years, and that’s just dumb. So this year I’m going to do something. I might need help figuring that something out, we’ll see.
Participate in the CrossFit sectionals. I don’t expect to qualify, or even come particularly close to qualifying, but I want to take part anyway to see what it’s like, and to give myself a training target. Given that at the end of March last year I was in fairly poor physical condition, competing in them at all will be an achievement.
I have some miscellaneous fitness-related goals I’ll lump together: break three hundred pounds on the deadlift, get to ten dead-hang pullups, get my shoulders strong enough to safely do kipping pullups again and then get to thirty of those, break 23:00 for the 5K. Just because it’s the first day of the year and I think I should set one of these that’s a lot further away for me, I’ll add this: do “Murph” in under 50:00.
Finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour. Just five episodes to write up, I simply need to get down to it.
Run a roleplaying campaign. I haven’t done this in fifteen years, and it’s time to start again. This already looks like it’s going to happen, but starting and finishing are separate things… this goal is to run at least one story arc, and to make it good (but not worry about it being perfect).
I don’t like having amorphous goals, but this last one is going in regardless. I need to do something about building a sense of community for myself. I’m not totally sure what this means, and it’s not that I utterly lack a sense of community now, but it’s not quite where I want it, and I need to figure out what it is I want to change and how to do it. I have a post kind-of in my head about this, which I’ll hopefully get down in the next few weeks.

That seems like a good set. I also want to read 80 books, but for some reason this year that doesn’t feel like a goal in the same way as the above.

Tags: coding, community, CrossFit, exercise, games, goals, MTG, personal, reading, roleplaying, web-development, writing

2009 Goals Review

Tadhg — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:43:17 +0000

I had eight goals for 2009, and all of them that I’m going to get done I’ve already completed. Time to review.

Here are the ones I accomplished:

Fix my blog. I resurrected the full blog in January, finishing on 27 Jan 2009. I’m rather happy to have gotten this one out of the way.
Fix my Subversion repository. I’m even more glad I did this, as version control is just too important not to have. It took me until 04 May to do this one.
Finish at least three software projects. More than three, even if none of them were sfmagic.org. The reST–WordPress pipeline, the various WordPress Plugins, and the RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain all qualify.

I abandoned the “write a summary/review/synopsis of every book I read” goal fairly early into the year, on 27 Feb. I don’t think I’m going to try that one again, as it just seems that the practice simply isn’t right for me.

That leaves four goals I didn’t accomplish:

Write at least one draft of the fantasy novel. This, for me, is the big one. I didn’t get anywhere close, and in truth I feel like I never really gave it a good effort. I’ll make it a goal again this year.
Read 80 books. It was looking great until the middle of the year, when my reading inexplicably dropped off. I’ll be at 56 or 57 by the end of December, which is off by quite a few. I’m really not sure what went wrong with this one, and will probably try it again next year also.
Finish pafib. Well, I got one, so just five more of those to go… I might not make that one a goal for next year, and instead I’ll just leave that series hanging around to work on whenever the right mood takes me.
Finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour. No progress, but I still want to get this one done, and so I’ll probably leave it on there next year as well.

Looking at it as “three out of eight” probably isn’t a great plan. Instead, I’m going to consider it a great thing that I fixed my blog, fixed my Subversion repository (both things quite central to my activities), and wrote quite a few bits of software that I’m happy with. The failure that stings is the fantasy novel, and with that, I must fall back upon the old chestnut of trying again.

Tags: Blog, goals, personal, reading, reStructuredText, software, version-control, web-development, writing

Favorite Posts of 2009

Tadhg — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:37:13 +0000

My best pieces this year. If I write an outstanding post in the next three days, I’ll cheat and add it to this list later.

Top Five

Reflections on Offendedness

Why being offended is a starting point for examination, not an argument in itself. I’m proud of this piece because it expressed reasonably well something that had been going around in my head for quite some time. 03 Aug 2009.
Bullying: Just a Hunch

Language, ‘sexting’, bullying, agency, and cultural toxicity. I’m proud of this essay because, again, it expressed well what I thought on the subject matter. 03 Dec 2009.
Violence in the Watchmen Movie

How the movie’s treatment of violence removes significant complexity from the narrative. I’m proud of this because it’s a good piece of criticism. 10 Mar 2009.
“Today’s 5K”

Poetry about running. I’m proud of this because it captures that run quite well. 03 Sep 2009.
Serena Williams’ Fine

Tennis-based, but really about the larger controversy. I’m proud of it because it’s a strong refutation of arguments I saw around the net and disagreed with. 11 Dec 2009.

Honorable Mention

A bunch of good stuff that I couldn’t quite put in the top five. In chronological order:

Some Thoughts on Racism and Science Fiction/Fantasy 13 Mar 2009.
My Take on Twitter 08 May 2009.
I Think I Think, Therefore I Think I Am Sun 10 May 2009.
Wimbledon, Women’s Tennis, and Sexism 30 Jun 2009.
Considering Carnivorism 20 Jul 2009.
An Instructive Example of CIA Wiretap Use 21 Jul 2009.
Don’t Watch Taken 10 Aug 2009.
NCAA Ethics Violation: Bagels with Cream Cheese 21 Aug 2009.
Yankee Stadium and What’s Wrong with America 09 Oct 2009.
A Photo From Yosemite 27 Oct 2009.
How Do Magic Weapons Work? 16 Nov 2009

Special Interest

These posts are good, but perhaps somewhat narrowly focused.

Fantasy World Sketch

I like this a lot and think it’s a shame that most of my non-gamer readers won’t appreciate it; on the other hand, I understand that it’s rather long (especially for a “sketch”). 09 Mar 2009.
Fifteen for Federer

I like to think that this captures something of what was a great match (and a tremendous achievement). 05 Jul 2009.
Tennis YEC: Swiss Better than Round-Robin?

Because it is, and I didn’t see this point made anywhere else. 27 Nov 2009.
Moving From Word Processors to reStructuredText

I strongly urge anyone who deals with text frequently to consider make a similar move. I wish I’d done it years ago. 12 Jul 2009.
RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain

Useful to anyone trying to get away from Word/RTF, and something of a milestone for my personal document handling. 24 Sep 2009.
New Blog Functionality: Related Posts

My Related Posts plugin for WordPress is a good addition to any WP blog using tagging. 01 Feb 2009.
Python Script for Subversion Status

A handy script for anyone using Subversion. 02 Aug 2009.
Better reST–WordPress Pipeline

Useful for anyone using both reST and WordPress, and a good example of the kind of thing made easier by a format like reStructuredText. 28 Jul 2009.
Python Extended List Slicing and Some Python Tips and Tricks

Tricks I like in Python. 01 Oct 2009 and 21 Dec 2009.
Better Word Count in jEdit

I care about word count, so I did it properly myself. 19 Jul 2009.

Tags: personal, writing

How Not to Spell “Gibraltar”

Tadhg — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 07:57:40 +0000

Proofreading appears to be appreciated less and less, a trend I’m not fond of in the least. I’m all for more democratic and widespread content production, but I still think that professional publications and media outlets should distinguish themselves at least in part by having good copy editors and proofreaders.

Various trends seem to be pushing against that idea, and it leads to egregious errors like this:

Sure, it’s just The Times. But it’s The Times referring to a British Territory, in a headline—how do they have anyone on their staff who doesn’t know how to spell “Gibraltar”[*], and why do they allow that person near their content?

[*]	Worse, who doesn’t know how to spell it and also doesn’t know that they don’t know, so that they don’t look it up before writing it into the headline.

Tags: media, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009 Fifth Check-In: Admitting Defeat

Tadhg — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:37:30 +0000

Yeah. Unlike the five previous times I’ve attempted to set a month-ish target for myself, it’s just not working.

“broken light” by laimagendelmundo

I’m not getting anywhere, and the smart thing to do is give up on it, relax, regroup, and next year try again. So that’s what I’m going to do.

My apologies for any expectations I raised with my announced intent to write the first draft. I also apologize for all of the “nothing’s happening” check-in posts.

I think it’s important to learn from failure, and here are some of the reasons why I think it didn’t work this time:

Muddled start. Not the start of the novel, but the start of the month. I had a bunch of things going on and wasn’t able to formally mark the occasion of beginning. It seems that I need things like this to start well, and so I needed to make more of an effort to kick it off well.
Too many distractions. Not a revelation, this, but I seemed to have too much other stuff happening in November. This wasn’t a question so much of time as of attention and focus. With my previous month-long runs, I’ve been willing to let lots of other things go, and that didn’t work this time. Next time out, I have to be willing to cut more stuff.
Mind tricks matter. In the past, I’ve used tricks such as not starting my morning pages or blog post for the day until I’d finished my fiction writing. This time I didn’t do that, partly because I just didn’t anticipate the writing being difficult. It turns out that isn’t the key factor, and that I should use tricks like that to ensure I comply with my own plans, even if that seems unnecessary.

I’m not giving up on the novel, which I will write. I’m just not going to get it done this year.

Tags: personal, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009 Fourth Check-In

Tadhg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:24:57 +0000

I hope that you readers don’t hate reading these weekly notifications of zero progress as much as I hate writing them. It’s been a bad month, and I’ve been almost completely unable to get anything at all done with the fantasy novel. I’ll keep trying to get somewhere for at least a couple more weeks, but I’m starting to have some serious doubts.

Tags: personal, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009 Third Check-In

Tadhg — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:35:14 +0000

It is both a bug and a feature of self-imposed arbitrary deadlines that you can arbitrarily move them yourself. Right now, I’m choosing to regard it as a feature, and am extending my deadline to 14 December. Thus I am now participating in what could be more accurately titled along the lines of “NaNoWriMo-and-a-half”.

Tags: personal, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009 Second Check-In

Tadhg — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:46:08 +0000

It’s still not going well.

The problem is quite simple: I’m just not devoting enough time to it. I haven’t had the focus required, so that it’s been far too easy to get distracted by all kinds of other things, either errands and chores or fun things to do or random stuff in the typical internet style.

As is typical with me, now that I’m trying to focus on this project, ideas for other projects come flooding in. For example, I’m intrigued once again by the prospect of running a fantasy roleplaying campaign. (Note that there’s no overlap whatsoever between the ideas for that campaign and the ideas for the novel I’m trying to work on.)

One of the most irritating things about this is that it seems so hard to predict (or create) the determination level I’ll have for projects. I’ve taken on harder projects in the past—I’d say that the editing of my science fiction novel two years ago was harder, and doing an Annotated FBH article every day for thirty-five days involved more writing time, but I was steadier for both of those endeavors than I have been so far for something that’s both easier (I still think it’s easier) and that I think of as more worthwhile (at least in the sense that I think the fantasy novel will turn out better than the science fiction novel).

The difficulty is more in the starting than the doing; that is, once I’m engaged in the writing process, the fantasy novel seems to hum along, so it’s the initial engagement that’s the tough part.

Despite the lack of progress halfway through November, there are at least two good things:

I’m still determined to finish it.
When I get down to the writing, my writing rate is approximately a thousand words an hour, which is reasonable and gives a realistic prospect of finishing within a decent timeframe.

Tags: personal, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009: First Check-In

Tadhg — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:34:10 +0000

Unfortunately, this attempt to write my fantasy novel in a month isn’t going well. In my experience, there are two critical things that you have to do in order to produce written material at a good rate:

Start.
Write even when it’s not flowing.

It took me far too long to do the first, and the second is just hard right now. I can still get there, but I’ve made it harder for myself, and I seem to have somehow underestimated the difficulty of going from the outline to the first draft.

Still, the truth is that it’s absolutely possible to do it, and that the key is to push past difficulty and just keep writing. On that topic, check out “How to Follow Through: The Emerging Science of Self-Control” over at The Rational Entrepreneur.

Tags: personal, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009

Tadhg — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:00:18 +0000

I’m planning to write a fantasy novel this month, using NaNoWriMo as a kind of inspiration. I don’t plan to actually register, and what I’m doing isn’t quite the same—I’ve got the bulk of a plan written already, and I’m aiming for sixty thousand words, two thousand words per day, instead of fifty thousand words. The novel I’m writing is one whose first chapter came to me in a dream, and which I’ve been trying to wrangle into a novel for a while. I won’t post daily progress updates—those would be pretty boring—but will probably do them weekly. Hopefully this will be an easier process than editing the second draft of my science fiction novel, which I did in November 2007 and which was one of the most difficult things I’ve done.

Tags: personal, writing

RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain

Tadhg — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:05:00 +0000

It took me a while to get there, but I now have a working toolchain to automate going from an RTF file (or a Word document) to reStructuredText. The final link took the longest to find, and turned out to have been right there all along (no, I’m not going to turn this into a retelling of The Alchemist). But if you’re interested in how to get from Word to a sane format (like reStructuredText), this post will interest you.

What you need:

textutil. If you’re not running OS X, I discuss some alternatives below.
pandoc. In Haskell, so you need to install the Haskell Platform for your system, and then run sudo cabal install pandoc.

Once you have those, it becomes pretty simple:

textutil -convert html -stdout {source_file} | pandoc -f html -t rst --no-wrap > {output_file}

If you don’t have access to textutil, you could try UnRTF, some Perl scripts, rtf2latex2e (if you don’t mind the lack of Unicode support), or rtf2html. If your source files are Word documents rather than RTF documents, you could use OpenOffice.org’s batch conversion utility to get them into RTF and proceed from there. (AbiWord is also an option.)

This is a rather powerful set of tools. It’s extremely useful for me to be able to automate the conversion of my older files, and once they’re in reStructuredText it’s not that hard to get them to other useful formats, including LaTeX and PDF. I have some work yet to do (mainly on styling), but soon I should, for example, be able to have a single reStructuredText file for my résumé that a script can automatically convert to HTML, PDF, HTML suitable for my blog, RTF, Word doc, OpenDocument Text, and plain text. The same should apply for any of my other documents.

It took me quite some time to find the right pieces for this process, which I’ll describe below in case it’s of use to others.

A while ago I came across pandoc, an extremely useful tool that translates between quite a few different formats—including reStructuredText. It took me a while to get it working, as it’s in Haskell and the MacPorts version of Haskell just wouldn’t install for me, so I eventually figured out that I should just use the standard Haskell Platform OS X release. Having access to pandoc meant that I wouldn’t have to write my own parser from some sane format to reStructuredText.

That did still leave me with the problem of getting from RTF to that unspecified sane format. rtf2latex2e looked extremely promising, but it turned out not to support Unicode in RTF. I found UnRTF, but it also had Unicode issues and furthermore would segfault whenever I ran it. rtf2latex had some other issues. I found a set of Perl scripts aimed at the problem, but they gave me odd errors that I couldn’t fix. Finally I came across rtf2txt, which had a critical reference to textutil.

textutil is built into OS X, at least versions starting with 10.4, and handles formats including text, RTF, HTML… and even Word documents. Furthermore, the HTML it produces is quite sane, and in many respects better than the OpenOffice.org or AbiWord HTML output, particularly for simple documents—e.g. italics are surrounded with tags and not tags with some difficult-to-parse class defined elsewhere in the document.

I do some additional work in Python to infer document structure from my files and insert that into the reStructuredText, but that’s fairly trivial.

Tags: coding, personal, python, reStructuredText, software, tech, writing
Related Posts
Better reST–WordPress Pipeline Tue 28 Jul 2009
Blog Workflow with reStructuredText Tue 14 Jul 2009
First Post With Vim Sun 14 Feb 2010
Better Word Count in Vim Sun 17 Jan 2010
Better Word Count in jEdit Sun 19 Jul 2009
Moving From Word Processors to reStructuredText Sun 12 Jul 2009
Some Vim Script Implementation, Testing, and Hackery Tue 16 Feb 2010
2009 Goals Review Tue 29 Dec 2009
Python Script for Subversion Status Sun 02 Aug 2009
Some Minor Software Projects Sun 27 Jan 2008

Literacy and Online Life

Tadhg — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:10:44 +0000

I always thought that the explosion of personal writing (email, instant messaging, blogging, microblogging) as the internet has gained acceptance would of necessity lead to an improvement in writing skills; it’s difficult to see how a massive increase in the amount of writing people do would fail to have that impact.

Indeed, the Stanford Study of Writing documents just such an improvement, as Clive Thompson reports in Wired. (Via SarahM.)

Despite voice communication, video, and online gaming, the internet is still primarily a text environment, and will continue to be so. The technical restrictions that forced it to be almost text-only at first may have been around just long enough to force a sufficient mass of people to use text and realize how powerful and efficient a medium it can be—a realization limited to a vastly smaller number of people in the pre-online era.

Tags: culture, internet, writing
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Friday Fast Game

Tadhg — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:28:21 +0000

Via Greg Costikyan comes The Nemean Lion, a very short text adventure. I find it interesting partly because it’s somewhat like microfiction, and because it plays with the form somewhat.

While I’m here, I should also mention Hamlet—The Text Adventure, which I’m rather fond of (and which is a signficantly larger game, although probably not huge by text adventure standards).

Tags: games, reading, writing
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