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The classic example of confusing it all is when we use multiple carriage returns to indicate to ourselves the start of a new section, and thereby determine what the spacing will be when we print. Or when we pick 'heading 2' because we prefer the font to that of 'heading 1'!

What Is Ideally Needed for Composition

If you look at the different tasks involved, and the ways in which your author is handling composition with the aid of paper, and wonder how to do it electronically, you come up with the following needs.

• An outliner, with the ability to place text into sections, and to move these sections, including text, around in the document without using select-cut-paste. The grandfather of outliners was the old More package for Macintosh. In terms of manipulation, the two best outliners I have seen for Linux are Leo and Treeline. There is some manipulative outlining capability in Open Office and in KWord. Lyx is weak in this at the moment.
• Navigation ability. Once you have written the document in sections, you must be able to get to those sections quickly and easily via some kind of navigator or table of contents. There are a couple of ways to do this. Open Office does it by the Navigator. This is a menu pane which can be kept on top of the document at all times, and double clicking on it will take you immediately to the section of choice. The Navigator pane can also be used in one mode as an outliner, giving the ability to move sections around. Kate has a left hand pane which does the same thing. Leo displays the document structure in a pane. Lyx has a drop down, step through menu, which allows you to navigate through the structure to the section you're looking for. Of them all, Lyx is probably the best, quickest, and least obstructive navigator. You can either use it as a pulldown step through menu, or as a permanent floating pane. But, Lyx does not have the ability to use it to move sections around.
• Search and replace. This should preferably not involve the use of regular expressions! You need to be able to scan text by section for strings, and manually pick what to replace. The author needs to be able to manually pick, because regular expressions are too forbidding, and consequently they will search for strings that are not only in the words they want to change, but in lots of other words as well. The kind of thing that works very well is in Open Office, both the spreadsheet and word processing functions, and in Lyx, where it is possible to find an occurrence and then make an individual decision whether to replace.
• Support for document structure. You have to be able to indicate when composing a book that parts of what you are writing fall into chapters or sections within them, and that other parts are footnotes. Support for bibliograhies is a desirable extra. Sometimes it is suggested that to overcome the difficulties associated with traditional word processors, authors should compose using a simple text editor such as Gedit, Kate and so on. This is not realistic because of the lack of support for structure. In eliminating all the layout features of Word Processors, these packages also oblige you to keep the document structure either in your head or on paper, or indicated by ad hoc formatting in the text itself - for instance, using square brackets for footnotes. I am sure novels and books have been written in Gedit, but this is doing it the hard way. The best support for document structure is in Lyx, followed by KWord and Open Office. Footnotes are not supported at all in Kate, Treeline or Leo. It is a mistake to think these features are page layout features. What fonts they appear in, how they are displayed on the page - these are page layout features. The ability to classify bits of your content as one thing or another is a composition feature.
• Robustness. It must be possible to handle documents of several hundred pages in length without worrying that a crash of the application is going to lose material. This is apparently a serious problem with MS Word Master documents. The problem is, that you want to have a book of several hundred pages in one document, to use the outlining features. But if this leads to instability and crashes, you are then obliged to break up the book into distinct independent files, and the only way to move material around becomes select-cut-paste from file to file, which gets very unwieldy. Lyx is quite nice in this respect, in that it it makes automatic backups as you write, which are written to the work file when you save. OO is said to occasionally crash, but be very robust in terms of file recovery. Kate and Leo are essentially programming editors, and I have not come on any material on their robustness in this application.
• Dual or paned views are very useful. This is a feature which allows you to have two windows into the same document, but at different points, and to make changes to either. The point is to be able to glance through a long section of the book, at the same time as making detailed changes here and there. The most sophisticated support for dual views is found in Leo, which has the ability to put together different sections of documents in different views, and to work on any section in any view. Kate and Treeline also have quite nice dual paned views. Lyx and OO do not support dual panes. To some extent this is made up for in Lyx by the speed and convenience of the navigator.

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