Ah, my child, it is well that you ask “Are not a word processor and a text editor the same thing?”
It is like unto two women who bought eggs. The first woman came home from the grocery store and put the carton of eggs into the refrigerator. The second woman, feeling she was being clever, put her eggs into a pan of water and hard boiled them all.
The next morning at the first woman’s house, her dear husband (DH) came in from shoveling snow and said, “My it is cold today. Could we make pancakes for breakfast?”
She answered, “Sure, I got eggs and milk yesterday. I would appreciate some help though.”
DH said, “Sure, thing!”
Their precious child (PC) came into the kitchen and sniffed the air.
“What are we having for breakfast?”
“Pancakes,” mom and DH said together.
PC then asked, “Could I have an fried egg over easy too?”
Mom replied, “Sure! You are growing so fast that I bet you need some extra protein.”
So they all sat down together and enjoyed breakfast.
PC then said, “Mom, my teacher asked us to bring some brownies for our bake sale tomorrow.”
“We have everything we need, lets do it together after you finish your homework tonight.”
At the second house, the woman took a cup of water she heated in the microwave oven and dissolved some instant coffee powder in it. She was just getting ready to crack and peel her hard boiled egg when DH came in from shoveling snow.”
“Gosh it is cold out today. Could we have pancakes for breakfast this morning?”
“Does this look like a restaurant? Anyway, we only have hard boiled eggs.”
“I am cold, it would be nice to have something hot for breakfast sometimes.”
“What, is your arm broken? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to boil water and there is instant coffee and hot chocolate mix in the cupboard.”
DH put on his work clothes and stopped at a fast food restaurant on the way to work.
A word processor program takes the plain text that you type in and turns it into something else, a binary file that is optimized for printing. A text editor preserves what you type in its original form. The reason this is an advantage is that sometimes you want put what you wrote into your blog, not print it. Heck, you can even write source code with your text editor! (Oops, that is what text editors were invented to do.)
It is just like with eggs, it is a lot easier to turn an egg into an omelette than it is to turn an omelette into an egg!
So, what do you do? For my part, I gave up trying to keep up with Microsoft when they ditched QuickBASIC and left me and a number of my Macintosh user clients in the lurch. Yeah, I admit it, I am a programmer, started punching cards for a FORTRAN IV class using an IBM mainframe in 1969.
I know, people look at you like you are crazy when you say you don’t use Word. “But ain’t Mikker Soff standerd?”
I started managing an electronic bulletin board for a community network before the web was generally available, like the early 1990s. It was hosted on a UNIX workstation. That is when I got acquainted with BBEdit, which my supervisor provided along with a PowerMac 6100. People would bring in information they wanted to post in the form of Word documents. What I did then is pretty much what I do now:
1. Get the person to use Save As to make the document into [mostly] plain text.
2. Look at the text and try to discern patterns. Once you get used to a particular writer’s habits, this becomes easier.
3. Use Find and Replace to correct the common nasties, like typographers quotes, accented vowels, and non-breaking spaces.
4. Use the BBEdit “Zap Gremlins” command, under the Text menu, to turn any remaining non-text characters into a bullet or whatever is convenient and readily visible.
5. Replace the bullets and read over the text again doing any final touchups.
6. Use the “reflow text” command, also under the Text menu, to create proper paragraphs if the person who saved the file as text added hard line breaks.
7. Save the file, just in case, then copy and paste the text into your WordPress editor (blog) and apply any needed formatting or start to convert it to HTML.
So to summarize, if you know you will be printing and only printing, go ahead and use a Word Processor. If you are preparing material for the web, use a text editor. TextEdit comes with Macintosh systems and most Windows machines have Notepad or Wordpad. You know why? Because, tah-dah, computers and the web run on PLAIN TEXT.
