PreAmble
I recently saw a couple of youtube videos that changed the way I look at things .. hopefully this will be the first of a few posts that explain some things and maybe one or two people will benefit.
Intro
When I was in my early teens, my Mother taught me to touch type (she was
a secretarial teacher). She also tried to teach me shorthand which I
never really cottoned on to, though I wish I had.
Never in my
wildest imaginings did I realise how valuable the skill of using a
keyboard was going to be. Fast forward to today and I still remember
that lesson. Learn something worthwhile and you have it for life.
Things Change
So how
does that relate to things today? Well for one thing document formats
change so frequently that if you author something in for example MSWorks
.. well in a few years it is not able to be read. This is a real worry
these days. If you have an MSWord document from a while ago (yes you
probably have to be old to appreciate this) .. well MSWord cannot read
it.
I have many documents in MSWorks .. the only way I can read them is with LibreOffice.
It is called Vendor Lock In ... or alternatively obsolesence.
Another
problem (apologies for using MSWord as the whipping boy) is that these
proprietary products change - MSWord is certainly guilty of that - you
get a new version and then you have to learn all over again.
So.
Are there any quality, free authoring products that you can rely on forever?
Yes. Lots.
LibreOffice
First
out of the gate for the curious is "LibreOffice". LibreOffice is
actively developed, is free and available for all platforms you are ever
likely to use. It reads and writes more document formats than MSOffice
and will be there forever, still able to write those document formats.
Why would you NOT use LibreOffice as your suite?
Here is the Wikipedia entry for it ....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
Things That are Worthwhile
Here is a list I'll be talking about in future posts.
Applications:
Emacs (orgmode, the killer app)
Vim (vimwiki - a second brain)
Obsidian (another second brain)
Markup Formats
Groff
LaTeX
Markdown
AsciiDoc
Web Apps
Trello
Simplenote
Video conference
Jitsi
