Common tasks and tools

Everyone does technical and professional writing, no matter what their job role. And in doing so, most folks turn to a favorite application or tool to make that job easier. There is no "one" tool for everything; some folks use Word or LibreOffice for documents, others use WordPress or Drupal for web content, and so on.

We asked our community to describe a writing app or technology that you use for your daily work, and what's a common task you use it for. Here's what you shared with us:

Damon Garn at Cogspinner Coaction likes CotEditor:

I use the CotEditor plain-text macOS editor daily. It's lightweight and quick, with few distracting menu items or obtuse features. It performs syntax highlighting, offers a split-window feature, and is easy to configure. This is another great example of an open-source project.

I rely on it for short, simple tasks like:

• Quick email or text drafts (like this one!).
• Basic Bash script editor.
• Quick edits of Markdown docs (it offers Markdown syntax highlighting).
• General "scratch paper" functionality.

Byron Patterson also uses CotEditor:

Notepad++ when using my work computer, CotEditor when using my Mac for SQL, SOQL, XML, and just everything in general.

Tomo Lennox is exploring AI:

In my previous position as an Agile coach and Kanban trainer, I did a lot of PowerPoint and Jira dashboard plugins. Now, as I train myself in AI, I am doing a lot of Claude.

Jac Campbell also uses AI;

I use AI tools to take notes during meetings and then edit heavily for content and reduce the amount of detail.

Robin Bland uses DITA:

I use Word for a lot of my drafting, but for me nothing tops using DITA for reusing and remixing content. I use Oxygen XML Author for creating content, but Oxygen XML Editor provides a good mix if I also need to get into the XML code to fix something by hand. I theme each one slightly differently to adjust the "experience" I need. 

Ellissia Falkman wrote:

As a grant writer, I like to use Word to write applications and receive comments from my team. I am still working on choosing a content reuse system on a Mac. I share application documents with my team using SharePoint and Power Automate. Biweekly, I use Power Automate flows that contain HTML and CSS to format updates from the SharePoint website. Essentially, these apps allow me to share updates about long grant applications in a short email!

Jim Hall writes in Markdown:

I use a variety of tools to do different things, and use the tool that best fits what I'm doing. But the one thing I use all the time is writing Markdown in Vim.

I can use any editor for that, but my fingers have memorized Vim very well; I can navigate around a document using the /slash and ?question keys to search. And the color themes in Vim make it easy to see what I'm doing. I modified the Morning color theme to provide slightly better highlighting for opening and closing brackets, and that's what I use most of the time.

I might finish a document in a different tool, but I usually write the first draft of anything using Markdown. I find that with Markdown, I can focus on the content of what I'm writing, and not how it will look. That helps me to jump right into it, and usually avoids the "blank page" problem.

Seth Kenlon loves Asciidoc:

Lately I've been writing a lot of software and process documentation and training material, and for that I've been using Asciidoc. It's a plain text format that uses expressive characters to indicate specific styling as necessary. For example, you can use asterisks to render text as *bold* and you can use underscores to render text as _italic_, and so on.

It's not my favourite notation. Surely slashes would be more evocative than underscores for italic text, and some styles don't exist without actual tags, such as [.line-through]#example# to render a strikethrough. What it lacks in elegance, however, it makes up for in flexibility. With the Asciidoctor toolkit, you can easily customise styles and layout using a YAML configuration file, so I've written content that's gotten rendered to HTML, Epub, and PDF for print, all from a single Asciidoc source. It doesn't replace a good layout tool like Scribus, but it's easier than XSL and for simple layout it tends to work well.

I write Asciidoc in Emacs, but only because Emacs is my default text editor. I've got the adoc-mode extension installed to highlight Asciidoc syntax, which helps me visually filter out markup so I can focus on the content. I've also written Asciidoc in Kate and Pulsar editors, and they both handle it just as well, but it's hard to beat Emacs's ability to run in a GUI or a text-only terminal and its ubiquity.

We also looked back at some of the interviews we've done with other authors to see what they had to say. Here are a few favorite tools from those interviews:

Tim Eiler writes project status reports in Microsoft Word:

Most of the project documentation I do is created using a tool like Microsoft Word. Tracking is done in Word, Excel, or a more-specialized application.

I write status reports of various types all the time. Many people think the purpose is to convey data about what the team has accomplished and is planning to accomplish. That's only the "data" part, though. It's the PM's job to help leaders do their jobs. The purpose of a status report is simple: To let decision-makers (the project sponsor, for example) determine whether they need to intervene in some way to help keep the project moving at the needed velocity.

Jeff Duntemann also uses Microsoft Word:

I've used Microsoft Word as my word processor for 35 years now. Before 1990 I used WordPerfect, and prior to 1985 I used Wordstar. Word was originally created in 1983 by people hired away from Xerox. I worked at Xerox my first ten years out of college, programming in-house languages that are now best forgotten. (Not Mesa or Cedar. I wish.) But I mingled with people who used and developed GUI apps, and I played with Smalltalk on the Alto machine in our building's lab. Late in my career there I taught staffers how to use the Xerox Star workstations being installed in our building. Xerox laid the foundations for GUI software, and it shows in Word.

Layout for print books and PDF ebooks I do in Adobe InDesign. Layout for reflowable ebooks (which I do not do for technical books because of reflowing hassles) I do in Jutoh, a British layout program designed specifically for creating reflowable ebooks.

Italo Vignoli prefers LibreOffice:

I am a heavy user of LibreOffice Writer to write articles and press releases, as well as longer documents such as white papers and e-books. I always use the native LibreOffice document format, which is open, standard and extremely robust, and thanks to this I have never lost a single document. I use styles for almost everything, plus advanced page formatting features such as the automatic table of contents.

And I can easily exchange documents with the rest of the world using both ISO standard ODF and proprietary Microsoft formats. Of course, I am very careful to use fonts that are installed on all PCs, or their open source equivalents, to avoid the document being screwed up just because the font is missing on the receiving PC. I also use LibreOffice Draw to open PDF files and make small changes.

Technical author David Both also writes with LibreOffice:

I use LibreOffice Write for my books. My publisher, Apress, prefers to get DOCX files. I start by creating my chapter files in Open Document Text (ODT) format. That is always my reference copy. When I'm ready to submit a chapter, I save it in DOCX and export it in PDF. LibreOffice can do that directly without extra software for either format.

Science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is most productive in WordStar:

I started with WordStar 2.26 on an Osborne 1 CP/M computer in December 1983, and I updated as each new version came along. The final version, WordStar 7.0, is what I've been using since 1992. Since WordStar was first released in 1978, fourteen years earlier, I'll point out that WordStar 7.0 has been the current version of WordStar for thirty-two years now.

I run WordStar under DOSBox-X (not plain DOSBox, which is aimed mostly at gaming) on a Windows 11 Pro computer, specifically a Framework 13 laptop, with two external monitors and an ergonomic keyboard attached.