“Writing a proposal. Oh boy do I hate word processors. There must be a better way.”

It turns out there is, though I ended up forging my own path to suit my skills and working methods. A little background…

I need to produce decent looking proposals for web development projects. Normally I bite the bullet and suffer the awkwardness of Word or OpenOffice or LibreOffice or something, and then export to PDF. It’s all very clever: it took some great minds to produce this software. But it really goes against the grain. It feels so wrong.

I like plain old text, and as a web developer I’m used to defining the style of documents by hand, in CSS, rather than using another program to do it for me, as I write. I would go further and claim that this is not just a matter of personal taste: word processors are bad for the world. Sure, people are used to them, and they cannot imagine a better way, and – most importantly – there is probably no equally mature, friendly, well-supported and funded software in place to allow for a move away from them as things stand. But it does not follow from this that they are good.

What’s Wrong With Word Processing?

The name, to start with. But most of all WYSIWYG. One thing I’ve learned from web development is the importance of respecting the logical separation of style and content. WYSIWYG is not so respectful. Everything happens in the same place and at the same time. Effectively, documents are typeset as you go, character by character. This is silly.

Formatting your document’s style has nothing to do with its content. What you are trying to say is a different concern from how it should look. And I do not mean that the two human operations are more conveniently handled by separate software operations. I mean that they are different human, conceptual, natural concerns. Of course it has to look good (although a. it doesn’t always have to, and b. even plain text looks way better than a clipartified Word document). Yes, of course your document has to conform to a company standard, or your own standard, and how it looks might be partly what you intend to convey. But all this precisely means that these standards and styles ought to be defined separately, beforehand, leaving you to get on with the writing: to concentrate on what it is you have to say. It is the difference between talking to somebody at a party and deciding what you are going to wear to that party.

Using WYSIWYG software such as the horribly feature-rich Word is like going to a party with several changes of clothes and proceeding to change them every time you think that what you’re saying doesn’t go with stripes. Sure, do the best you can to look good, but prepare for that, by going shopping, trimming your beard, and putting on your best Y-fronts. After all that’s done you can get on with talking to people and getting drunk, safe in the knowledge that you’re looking great. Underdressed? Well, if you didn’t care enough to prepare, to research, and to tune your attire accordingly, then you shouldn’t care about being underdressed.

Now, moving on from that straining analogy, the biggest benefit of separating style and content is that content becomes independent of how it is presented. If standards of presentation change, or a piece of writing needs to be reproduced in different formats, or you’ve finally got tired of Comic Sans, then you shouldn’t be going anywhere near your content to achieve the desired formatting changes. But word processors force you to do this. You actually have to open and edit your document, just to re-style it. This wrongheadedness has been spectacular in its worldwide detrimental impact.

(Note that I’m quite ignorant of Word and the no-doubt very sophisticated setups that can be achieved in organizations where stanadardized presentation is important. For all I know maybe you don’t always have to go back and edit your document or re-assign a template of whatever. However, achieving this is just a workaround, and likely would not have a perfect success rate; it seems clear that the default expectation of the software is that you do mix up content and presentation.)

And faced with the option, the expectation, to fiddle about with fonts and bullets, it takes discipline, imposed from above or by yourself, to beat down that natural inclination. This is not a matter of freedom. In my case, I have to struggle with formatting issues almost every time I write – or rather, process – one of these documents, because I might be using different word processors on different platforms with different fonts or whatever. This should not even be an issue, because we already know, deep down, that style and content are logically separate categories (note that this does not mean that they do not sometimes overlap). And in a company environment, standard templates for Word and detailed strictures and guidelines from management on formatting, fonts and colours, are awkward and only partly successful workarounds for a problem that would not exist without WYSIWYG.

The writer of a document has expertise in the subject addressed by that document. They may not have expertise in typography and layout, and usually they do not. The latter, then, becomes nothing but a distraction and a huge waste of time. And … I didn’t ask you to send me a bloody Word attachment in the first place!

The natural paradigm for me, which I get from web development, is to write stuff in a text file, and to define how it looks in another text file, and only then to view how it will look to the document’s recipient. I believe this should go for print documents as well as HTML web pages.

It is already the way of things in printing, publishing and professional writing. I don’t believe Proust was worrying about typefaces when he painstakingly described the memory of a hawthorn bloom, and the prevalence of Word has not made this any less true of professional writers today. Why should any writer, or anyone who becomes a writer for brief periods – whether of poems or proposal documents or annual reports – have to worry about such things? Why has the division of labour, both human and machine, which is so thoroughly advanced in the modern world, been bypassed in this case?

Lightweight Markup

A few years ago I discovered Textile, which is a lightweight markup language. What a Godsend. I can get on with writing:

All in a text editor. You know, like Notepad only with nice colours and productivity tools. There’s nothing and nobody messing around processing what I write. Processing comes later, based on separate settings that I have set up for the scenario.

My Great Solution Which, Though Great, Could Most Probably Be Vastly Improved Upon

Up till now I’ve only really used Textile to generate HTML for display on web sites, usually blog posts, but now that I’ve (mostly) moved away from Windows and on to Linux, manipulating text becomes all the more easy. I’ve created a nice wee setup to generate PDF documents styled with CSS straight from a Textile file. I should stress that this involves the terminal and bash scripts, so it’s probably for geeks only.

The upshot is that when I want to write a proposal, I just run a couple of commands to set up a proposal project based on a template, and then get down to writing my document in Textile, and when I want to see what it’ll look like I just run ~/gopdf.sh, which generates a PDF.

The gopdf.sh bash script does three things in order:

A. Generates an HTML file from the textile file using pandoc
B. Generates a PDF from the HTML file using xhtml2pdf
C. Opens the PDF

(If I had actually got to the stage where I’ve built up a nice PDF stylesheet I would have shown you something more fancy, but there you go. And the sharp-eyed among you will notice that the line of text immediately following the list is squashed up to it. This might be a problem with pandoc’s understanding of textile, which is not perfect, favouring the alternative Markdown as it does. You can include HTML in among the Textile markup, so a line break here is easy to achieve, or else a CSS bottom margin would probably do it, and would probably be the better choice.)

What it Allows Me to Do

Before I describe how I make all this possible, here in more detail is what I now do every time I get a new client who wants a proposal.

One

So I meet with Bob of Bob’s Cake Company fame, and he tells me he wants a cake web app. I say sure, no problem, then I go home, start up Linux and create a folder called bobs_cake_company, and cd into it. Then…

The first command copies over my standard proposal template folder to bobs_cake_company as a sub-folder called “proposal”. The second one just opens the current folder, bobs_cake_company, in Sublime Text 2 (I seem to remember doing some things to get that “subl” command working, but I’m not sure what. Probably just a symlink.)

Two

I write the document in the file that is there waiting for me, proposal.textile. Remember, by writing I just mean writing. Not fiddling with margins or choosing bullets or struggling with alignment issues or fixing pasted text or making sure that the screenshot isn’t blurry or anything else like that.

Three

In the terminal…

This generates a stylesheet from the SASS files in which I define the CSS stylings. Full disclosure: currently my method is in its early stages so I don’t yet have a good standard CSS stylesheet for PDFs. I’ll be building this as I go along for a project or two before I can just leave it alone. So right now I’m actually running this Compass watcher when I begin writing, because I’m styling as I go, like a human word processor. Not for long.

Four

Then in the terminal (in a new tab):

This creates a PDF (or overwrites the one that already exists), and then opens it in the default PDF viewer. Thereafter I just run “~/gopdf.sh proposal” whenever I want to see my changes in the PDF.

Five

Send proposal to client and have a cigarette.

Making it All Possible

The process I’ve just described depends on a few pre-existing elements:

• pandoc
• xhtmlpdf
• startdoc.sh bash script
• gopdf.sh bash script
• a proposal_template folder with goodies in it
• Compass (optional)
• Sublime Text 2 (optional)
• A dangerous, expensive and anti-social nicotine addiction (optional)

You do the following stuff once only.

Get pandoc: Pandoc is a Haskell library that converts between lots of different kinds of documents. I would have used it alone had it been able to convert Textile and CSS to PDF directly. (I couldn’t make it work and concluded that pandoc couldn’t do it, but I could be wrong.)

Installation instructions are here

Get xhtml2pdf: xhtml2pdf is a python package that generates PDF files from HTML and CSS. It can be installed with easy_install or pip and also available to download here

If you are so inclined, get Compass: Compass is a CSS authoring framework built on Ruby and SASS. You write in SASS and Compass generates CSS files for you. The latter are what you actually run on the server. I’ve been using it for a year or so and I love it. One of the reasons I like it is just because I can avoid the curly braces and semi-colons of CSS itself. I’m addicted to significant whitespace. (Though it’s worth noting that they’ve been going after designers and have opted to make their SCSS syntax the default because SASS looks too much like programming).

More details on installing Compass here

If you need a great text editor, get Sublime Text 2:It’s all the rage, and for good reason. Get it here

Create startdoc.sh:

This copies the proposal template folder, renames it depending on your argument, and also renames the .textile file.

Create gopdf.sh:

This is where the action happens. It runs pandoc to convert from Textile to HTML – along with print.css – and then runs makepdf.py (which in turn runs xhtml2pdf, as we shall see) to take proposal.html and generate proposal.pdf.

Create the proposal_template folder

We need to create a standard proposal template that will thereafter be copied over to a new project any time you run ~/startdoc.sh. It consists of a folder structure which looks like this:

The folder sass contains the Compass SASS file; stylesheets contains the CSS that is produces from the SASS, namely print.css; config.rb is the Compass config file; and makepdf.py runs xhtml2pdf, but is itself executed by the gopdf.sh bash script. The folder fonts contains font-files that can be included in the PDF by using @font-face in the stylesheet.

Once all this is copied over by startdoc.sh, proposal.textile is where all the writing happens.

The Python script, makepdf.py, looks like this:

This is called in gopdf.sh, specifically this line:

So running ~/gopdf.sh proposal will get pisa to take proposal.html and generate proposal.pdf. Pisa, by the way, is the original name – or central core – of xhtml2pdf.

In the near future I hope to fill the standard print.css with lots of proposal-specific stylings, and proposal.textile will probably contain my standard section headings and table of contents.

By the way, when creating the standard template, the Compass stuff can be set up automatically by running the following command.

(If you like the SASS syntax, that is)

WordPress

I’m writing this in Textile right now, but it struck me that I only had a WordPress blog to post it to. I can use Textile for my philosophy blog, because I built the engine myself in Django, but I hadn’t got far in the past trying to get Textile working in WordPress. Thankfully, Veeti Paananen has provided a plugin, Simple-Textile which seems to work nicely.

It’s really time to move this blog, and a redesign is probably overdue.

Afterthoughts

If you’re not a coder, but you’re an author or just do a lot of writing, and you don’t have to worry too much about making your words look good enough for Bob of Bob’s Cake Company to print out — but you do want a nice, pleasing, peaceful, distraction-free writing environment, then there are some nice minimalist editors out there at the moment, such as OmmWriter and WriteRoom.

I get basically the same thing in Sublime Text when I put it in “distraction-free mode”, so my programming and web design editor also functions as a nice place to write about Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Karl Marx and the evils of traffic control.

But when it comes to writing something big or complex like a book or a thesis, folks sometimes opt for specialist software, such as editors that revolve around the LaTex typsetting markup system. These are usually built on the same paradigm that I’ve been describing, namely the separation of style and content, which is especially important with documents primarily intended for professional print publishing. Word processors are strictly for home and office use, and I imagine those in the world of printing never touch them with a bargepole. It must be galling that word processors are these days thought to be the last word in setting and styling type, because while they have cast that noble profession into obscurity – though certainly not into obsolescence – their own ability to do it well is tragically lacking. Next time you’re in a print shop ask them what they think of Microsoft Word, so long as you don’t find anti-Microsoft rants boring.

Thanks to all of the wonderful and generous programmers out there without whom I would likely still be shouting at Word like a madman.

Further Reading

I’m not the only one, you know.

Why Do I Hate Word Processors?
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient
What has WYSIWYG done to us?

To describe nuclear power as clean might seem perverse, given that some of the waste produced is so dangerous that there is no containment material that won’t be destroyed by it, and that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

But last week the government finally said yes to the construction of up to ten nuclear power stations, at least some of which might be up-and-running by 2020. They’ve put off the decision for a long time. New Labour, motivated for so long by the desire to be liked, refused to face the impending energy crisis. Now that the closure of many of our existing nuclear power stations is fast approaching (several over the next twenty years), and now that they have the fortifying experience of not being liked, they’ve bitten the bullet.

Generally, my main concern is for progress, for economic development, which I believe is the basis for a society of free and equal people, living fulfilling lives. A wealthy, technologically advanced country like Britain needs base load power stations, ones that provide a constant flow of power. It looks like renewables cannot provide much of this, so the answer must be coal, oil and nuclear. Given the need to reduce CO2 emissions, this means we need to go for nuclear or clean coal – or both. From this perspective, nuclear power is very important, because clean coal is still in its infancy.

Nuclear can be considered clean because it does not pollute the environment. Although the high-level waste is extremely dangerous, in practise it doesn’t actually harm people or the environment, if stored correctly. And there isn’t much of it. Ten new nuclear power stations with a lifetime of sixty years would produce 40,900 cubic metres of this waste, which is half the volume of the Albert Hall. (1) The projects for the waste’s short-term and long-term containment look good: Managing our Radioactive waste Safely (Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, PDF)

Nuclear is now one of the safest, cleanest ways we have of producing energy, but it got a bad name for itself in the eighties and nineties. This is partly owing to scientific ignorance and a mis-perception of risk, but the nastiness of the nuclear industry couldn’t have helped either. “The nuclear industry, for most of its life, has been, to put it at its mildest, economical with the truth” (2)

While I’m broadly supportive of the new plans, I can sympathise with those who aren’t and who know how despicable the industry has been in the past. It’s been run by a secretive cabal of shamans and priests, jealously guarding their power against outsiders. I don’t know how much it has changed, but can we afford to hold things up while they get their act together? We certainly need a completely open, honest and unapologetic nuclear industry, not one that will reinforce the perception of witchcraft. But we also need to get started on the new stations now.

My fondest childhood memories are of living in the little village of Fairlie, a mile or two south of Largs, on the North Ayrhsire coast. In this part of Ayrshire the towns cling to a narrow stretch of land between the sea and a big lump of uninhabitable high moorland, now called Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park, extending from Greenock in the north to West Kilbride in the south, and inland to Lochwinnoch and Kilmacolm. And with Cumbrae, Arran and Bute enclosing the Firth of Clyde, this stretch of coastline has a sheltered, cosy feel to it. It’s dramatic and picturesque, but not overwhelming (I’ve only just realized that I have this knowledge, or appreciation, after having been away for a long time.)

View Larger Map

Hunterston nuclear power station faces across the bay, from underneath the cliffs at Portencross, to Fairlie and Cumbrae, and it was part of my childhood world, along with the huge ore terminal. The memory of seeing Hunterston “A” – the old Magnox reactor, now being decommissioned – illuminated at night, is strong. I visited it once (although it was probably Hunterston “B”, the newer but less attractive station just next-door), as part of my physics class, and I was struck by how empty it was. Self-centred cynical adolescents we may have been, but even we were awed by the caverns of concrete and steel, and the cathedral-like proportions, and just the thought of that massive hidden power was enough to convince us that we could feel it under our feet and buzzing in the air.

A few dozen metres out to sea are the intake and outlet stations for the cooling system. I remember being struck by the sight of the big bubbling patch where the warmed water was returned to the sea. You can see both the intake and outlet very clearly on the satellite image. The white blob is the latter.

Now that I’m in Edinburgh, my local nuclear power station is Torness, on the coast of East Lothian. You get a good view of it from the East Coast Main Line railway. A couple of years ago, one of its walls became a projector screen for Europe’s biggest art installation, Lumin de Lumine by Ken McMullen. See a picture of it here on this particle physics website.

(1) The Future of Nuclear Power, DTI, May 2007
(2) Reporting the Nuclear Industry: Sorcery versus Common Sense, The Uranium Institute

Government go-ahead:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7179579.stm

The water head – the vertical distance from the turbine to the intake at the reservoir, is 600 metres, the highest in Britain. That’s just as well, because there aren’t any big rivers up there, and to get a half-decent flow they’re having to gather together a number of burns.

http://www.topomatika.hr/Applications/turbine-en.htm

The power station will use a Pelton turbine. The American Lester Allan Pelton invented it in about 1870, and it’s still going strong. It’s pretty much the most efficient way of getting the energy out of a jet of water. It works by getting energy from the force of a high-speed jet, not from the pressure of the head of water. And with a high head of 600 meteres you can get a pretty fast flow going.

We’re not about to run out of rain any time soon – any more than we’re about to run out of wind – so it’s as sustainable as you can get. Some members of the walking community were opposed to it, at least in the beginning, but it’s generally viewed favourably by environmentalists and it’s popular with the locals. (As it is, the area isn’t much frequented by walkers anyway, and it’s primarily been only a deer and grouse hunting area for a long time.) It’ll have a capacity of 100 megawatts, which is a huge contribution to the country’s energy – the equivalent of 50 wind turbines.

Scottish & Southern Energy seem to have been very careful not to disturb any important or sensitive species of wildlife. Concerning the water vole, they even went as far as to establish that the dam and reservoir will destroy only a few disused burrows. Whether the presence of a single water vole at the bottom of the valley would have stalled the project, I’m not sure.

If you can’t get enough of all this water engineering, the scheme featured in a radio program by Adam Hart-Davis a couple of years ago, when construction was just beginning. You can still listen to it here. Also, have a look at my other posts, on the Great Man-made River Project and the Loch Sloy Power Station.

BBC report
Edinburgh Evening News report
Glendoe scheme official site

I listened to a Radio 4 programme on the Great Man-Made River project in Libya. For the moment at least, you can listen to it here. It’s the mother of all water engineering projects, and as I’ve said before in this blog, I have an odd fascination with this kind of thing. Apart from anything else the project is beautifully simple, audacious and progressive. According to Unesco it’s the largest engineering scheme currently being carried out in the world, and it has also been described as the eighth wonder of the world. From where I sit in mean little Britain, which made such a cynical fuss about the Channel Tunnel and the Scottish Parliament building, it’s very inspiring.

In the sixties, during oil exploration in Libya’s part of the Sahara desert, they found vast quantities of underground water in fossil aquifers. As it turns out there are four major underground basins, three of which combined contain 35,000 cubic kilometres of water. That’s 35,000,000,000,000 cubic metres (what’s that, 35 trillion?)

Scratching a living from the desert ain’t much fun, so around 1980, “The people of Libya under the guidance of their leader, Colonel Muammar Al Qadhafi”, began looking into the possibility of accessing it. The Great Man-made River Authority was created in 1983 to organize the project, which was mainly about getting the water from the aquifers all the way to the populated coastal regions on the Mediterranean in the north of the country. The solution was simple: huge pipes.

The importance of the project for the development of Libya’s society can hardly be overstated. To create a thriving agriculture from a desert land is a beautiful thing, and despite the scepticism in the Western media – a few years ago I read a newspaper article that described it as a vanity project of Gadaffi’s that was doomed to failure – it has worked. Phases one and two are complete. Phase one provides two million cubic metres per day along a 1,200km pipeline to Benghazi and Sirt. Phase two delivers a million cubic metres a day to the fertile Jeffara plain, and to the capital Tripoli. Phase three is now in full-swing.

I don’t understand the attitude of the Western press. Here’s a quote from a website about the project which describes what I’m on about:

London and Washington circles were apoplectic about the opening of the new Libyan water project. The London Financial Times ran criticisms of the project from Angus Henley of the London-based Middle East Economic Digest. The pipeline, he said, was ‘Qaddafi’s pet project. He wants to be seen as something other than the scourge of the West.’ The Financial Times called the project Qaddafi’s ‘pipedream,’ stating that critics may be awed by the engineering involved, ‘But they regard the dream as a monument to vanity that makes little economic sense in a country where the U.N. Development Program says 94.6% of territory is desert wasteland.’

Am I missing something? It is precisely because Libya is mostly desert wasteland that this project is important. And as to the economic argument, here’s the quantity of water per Libyan dinar obtained for each of the available options:

(Great Man-Made River Authority )

Also online you can find the results of a study carried out by some American water engineers, which supports the economics of the project: The Great Man-Made River in Libya, Does it Make Sense? (PDF)

Listening to the radio program, several things were apparent. The people overseeing and working on this project have an innocent love for their work. They are engineers making life better for the people: sometimes it is just that simple. And they had an openness about the project which the journalist hadn’t expected in this demonized country. Also, it’s both an international effort and strongly Libyan: they’ve taken expertise from around the world (even American), and used it to learn from and develop their own self-sufficient expertise, to realize this very Libyan dream.

The river is a new lesson and an example in the struggle to achieve self-sufficiency, food security and true independence. No nation that depends on a foreign country to feed its people can be free. The Great River is a triumph against thirst and hunger. It is a defeat against ignorance and backwardness. It reflects the determination of Libyans to resist colonial pressure, to acquire technology, to develop, to improve their lives, and to control their own destiny in accordance with their own free will.

Ali Baghdadi

It got me to thinking about Libyan society, which is referred to by the Libyans as a democracy, in contradiction to our common understanding of the word. The theoretical basis is set out in Gadaffi’s Green Book, the full text of which is presented quite nicely at this site.

According to the website of the Great Man-Made River Project, the project was implemented by the people:

…the decisions for the implementation and funding of The Great Man Made River project were made at the grass roots level by the basic people’s congresses that were then compiled and made into laws by the General Peoples Congress. The project is funded directly by the Libyan people in the form of levies on fuel, tobacco and international travel etc.

On the surface it sounds like a good system to me.

Now, I am aware of the concerns about human rights in the country. Currently there is a foreign medical team there under penalty of death (see the Wikipedia article), and there has been much political repression, including assassinations of dissidents and exiles. The Berber minority was mistreated and derided for decades, and there doesn’t seem to be a place for freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

I certainly do not want to dismiss all of that, so I hope I don’t seem glib in saying that the theory on which the system is based strikes me as good. Gadaffi says that electoral democracy is not democratic at all, because it is so indirect. The solution is direct democracy, in which all participate in the study and debate of issues and policies confronting the nation. Partcipation as opposed to representation. This is the Athenian model, and was possible in city-states because of their small populations. But to implement it on a large scale requires the following set-up:

First, the people are divided into Basic Popular Conferences. Each Basic Popular Conference chooses its secretariat. The secretariats of all Popular Conferences together form Non-Basic Popular Conferences. Subsequently, the masses of the Basic Popular Conferences select administrative People’s Committees to replace government administration. All public institutions are run by People’s Committees which will be accountable to the Basic Popular Conferences which dictate the policy and supervise its execution. Thus, both the administration and the supervision become the people’s and the outdated definition of democracy – democracy is the supervision of the government by the people – becomes obsolete. It will be replaced by the true definition: Democracy is the supervision of the people by the people.

The trouble is, in real Libya this is just one side of things. In practice, it is not the theory on which the society’s organization is based, because overseeing everything you have the Revolutionary Committees, headed by Gadaffi and the military, with unlimited powers: a revolutionary dictatorship that refuses to wither away. So despite how attractive the system of democracy may look to a socialist or anarchist, it cannot be taken to be all-encompassing and the country in general cannot be taken to be truly democratic. But if the democratic aspect of the system were to be all-encompassing, and the military dictatorship done away with, it would be a true democracy.

Further reading:

Great Manmade River Project:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4814988.stm
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/man_made_river_libya.htm
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/
http://www.unesco.org/water/ihp/prizes/great_man/gmmrp.shtml

Summary of the Green Book: http://www.country-studies.com/libya/the-green-book.html

Human rights:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde190022004
http://members.tripod.com/~sijill/