i don’t write poetry but i do take photographs, digital photographs, that i keep on my computer with a back-up to an external drive. but i rarely print out my photos any more. thinking about some of the points you write about here though has me wondering whether it is not time to start doing so again. thanks for the provocative read.

One of my favorite things about word processing is that it lets poems divide (or more rarely, merge) painlessly. I often find that a poem I’m working on is actually more than one poem. Save the doc under a new name, swoosh through and delete the other poem’s lines — and hey presto! Two poems where there was one. I love that.

I learned word processing on the Unix world’s “vi” editor, which was a bit quicker — far less mouse-based — than the Windows-based editors. I suppose I might still go off to Linux land, eventually, except that I’m probably too lazy.

A great breakthrough for me was Numenius’s recommendation of Scribus — yet again, excellent freeware — for desktop publishing, i.e. things such as designing brochures or business cards. Before that I tried to do such work on word processors, which can kinda sorta do it, but only at the cost of much hair-tearing.

The right tool for the right job. There are tons of wonderful, free software tools out there. If there’s anything I’ve learned, working in software for many years, it’s — don’t let your tools push you around. Take the time to find the right ones and learn how they work: you recoup the time thus spent almost at once.