I had a weird and perhaps not entirely practical thought the other day about designing markup editors that might actually be pleasurable to write in. Let me share before I forget (since I forgot once already, and will likely forget again).
Speaking broadly, markup editors have either tried to act like text editors that constantly proclaim “oo! oo! I know what an angle bracket is and you better know too!” or WYSIWYG word processors. Neither of these, as has been constantly pointed out by people who, you know, write, is an especially good paradigm for composition or editing processes.
What we need to figure out, I think, is what people do when they’re writing longhand. Because, I mean, people have been marking complex structures in longhand manuscripts some way or other. By “complex,” I mean “containing more interesting and varied text constructs than paragraphs and maybe a heading or two—marginalia, tables, lists, and figures at the least.” So they must signal the existence of these constructs, even without a lot of the typographical gizmos we rude mechanicals use to do it.
We need to know not just what signals they use, but something about the thought-process of putting them in, both as they occur and retroactively. Sort of a usability test for longhand.
My hope would be that this would allow markup-editor designers to include features that feel intuitive to writers (as opposed to data entry grunts or programmers), and to get the rest of the damn editor out of the way. Because, boy, it sucks when our tools get in our way.
The main problem with this is finding enough test subjects who still write, say, complex journal articles in longhand. I’m 32, no spring chicken, and save for my signature I don’t write anything longhand except when I’ve basically no choice.
Of course, we could also discover that writers who use longhand don’t make a practice of marking structures at all—they leave their editors to do it. I think this outcome quite likely, in fact, and I would chortle heartily if it proved true, because it would underline something I’ve said often and often: if you want markup to catch on in publishing, the people you need backing you aren’t the authors—they’re the production editors.
