Draft Printout

My most comfortable writing process involves making paper printout of the text drafts and adding corrections manually. Regrettably, what looks good in text editor screen doesn’t look good when making corrections to drafts, and that doesn’t look good when printed and served to the reading public, so I need different layouts for different purposes. I used to edit text in OpenOffice.org, but regrettably, I’m too lazy to built byzantine OpenDocument XSLTs and the macro language in OO.o is pretty cryptic, so altering the styles automatically is hard. And, of course, the new old laptop is too puny to run OpenOffice.org in first place.

Therefore, I’ve switched to LaTeX as my work document format. PDFs for the website are easy to make, and Draft Printout is a script that produces a draft-format LaTeX file with word counts, all proper date annotations, etc.

The name is tentative. The script has gone through a lot of versions and it’s currently based on Ruby and Liquid template language. It will be released later, as soon as I clean it up a bit.