I think we’ve let a term slip through our collective defences against nonsense and foolishness. Programs like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect are referred to as “word processors”.
Word processing? Think about it. It’s the dumb term. An editor or writing application maybe. Have you ever told someone, “I’m not listening to you, I’m sentence parsing.”
I think it is a hold over from technological competition long since defeated by the PC and web.
In the early 1980’s IBM had everyone using machine gun typewriters which had a one line memory that displayed until you hit then end. You could correct typos from the line. Then once you went to the next line of typing the previous line printed off at once and was fixed. In the early 90’s I was using a mid-80’s typewriter that had no hard drive but did take 3.5 floppies – but, I seem to recall, no cache so you have a disk for each form of document, letter, memos, etc. which allowed you to carry the template for that on each disk. These things were what the early word processors were competing with. And the pre-internet connecting PC were primarily word processors as spread sheets were the realm of nerdy accountants and bookkeepers. We were all dreaming of personal book publishing care of those nasty plastic ring binding thingies.
I’d say you are quite correct to shout out that the continuing use of word processor for the writing app in a personal computer is wrong.
Open-source wins again: OpenOffice‘s WP app is called “Writer!”
Still, pen-and-paper this ain’t. Paper (or a plain text editor) mostly offers a writing space; WP apps dare you to make documents. It seems right to draw a distinction.
Then again, pen-and-paper allows margins, emphasis, drawings … not just writing. Come to think of it so does Notepad in a way. In an office, if someone says they wrote something you can bet it’s living in an MS Word file. And I think nothing of saying to someone, “I just wrote you,” meaning I sent them email. From me, that’s typically more of a document than a scribble. Telephones are for scribbling.
I guess there never was “just writing,” that all the world’s a document of some kind, straight back to Altamira‘s walls. If so, Steven’s implication that we don’t really need a separate term for word-processing is correct, and that awkwardly insisting we do is probably false nostalgia or Luddism … or self-aggrandizement. Let’s face it, the first time a teenaged girl dots an “i” with a heart or spills a drop of floral perfume on the page it’s not just writing any more.
Btw, I had an awfully easy time installing OpenOffice for *nix on OS X Panther under Apple’s X.11. It’s probably true that OO’s choice of the name “Writer” is no more elegant than M$’s choice of “Word.” But Writer is free. Maybe that will let us stop talking about word-processing once and for all.
LQ
word processors and text editors are different beasts.
a word processor is designed to format text and generates a file that has all sorts of meta information in it. if it does bold, italic, lists and all that stuff it’s a word processor.
a text editor just allows for the input of raw text with no formatting. it stores data as raw ascii (or unicode) with no metadata.
obviously, a word processor can “downgrade” to being a text editor.
frymaster: a text editor just allows for the input of raw text with no formatting. it stores data as raw ascii (or unicode) with no metadata.
This is only true from a certain traditional perspective. Folks have been informally marking-up plaintext long enough for conventions to arise. Emoticons are the usual example, but there are others.
Keying ALL CAPS in plaintext is widely understood as bad form. Surrounding text intended as *bold* with asterisks is in wide use, as is _emphasis_. Double linefeeds demark paragraphs to every English speaker. There’s more going on here than text. Hyperlinks are enabled in many plaintext environments. If that ain’t metadata, what is?
Pressing the point further, simple scripting can transform these conventions into legitimate (?) markup with no intermediate conditions. Witness Matt Mullenweg’s Texturizer and autop , Wiki markup, and especially Dean Allen’s brilliant Textile.
It’s not that these can transform simple ASCII into richer output, rather that they validate informal markup conventions that already exist in the plaintext world.
To Steven’s point, the gap between Notepad and WP apps has all but closed, persisting only for those who insist on a distinction that the language can probably dispense with. It’s all just writing. If you doubt this, ask yourself if a typewriter produces text or documents.
LQ