I don’t normally talk about the software I use in writing articles, whether for the printer or for a website. The computer is like the typewriter (remember that old machine from the last century?). When you type an article, you don’t talk about whether you’ve been using a Brother or Olympia typewriter to create it. It is the content that matters after all. But when someone does ask me about the software I recommend, then I immediately ask: “what particular task?” You see, apart from the operating system that makes it possible for me to use the computer and the antivirus software I keep running in the background everytime the computer is on, there are other software applications installed in my computer that allows me to do particular tasks. For browsing, I use Opera because it is faster than both FireFox and I.E. For office word processing, I use Microsoft Office. For creating graphics, I sometimes use Windows Paint, but more often, it is PhotoFiltre I employ and, for taking snapshots, ScreenShot Captor. For viewing graphics, I normally use Irfanview. But for other tasks, I use a bunch of free and non-free software that I’ve downloaded from the web and keep installed in my system until I find a better one.

When I write an article for Res Biblica, I have a software for each step of the writing process. I begin by going to the NAB website for the reading of the Sunday I am going to write on. I copy the whole page that has all the readings and paste it into EverNote. Then I close my modem to prepare my article offline.

I still am old-fashioned when writing drafts of an article. I use the low-tech notebook and pen for composing my article notes. But for streamlining references to Bible passages, I use the e-Sword (for English and Tagalog; it has “Ang Biblia”) and The Word (for Greek and Hebrew). While I compose my article, I use the thesaurus in Word Web

After writing my notes (analysis, word study, etc.), I go online once more to look for webpages that I can reference from the article I am about to post. For the purpose of cataloguing web links, I currently use the C-Organizer Pro which I got for free from CSoftLab. Before CSoftLab accorded me a free license, I was using Scratch for cataloguing web links. When I am satisfied with my harvest of links, I continue my work offline.

I type the sections of my article into AZZCardFile which was also given to me free after I wrote a review of it and created a link for it at AgustinongPinoy’s Weblab. Sometimes, I find it necessary to create a graphic file illustrating the structure of a particular text. What I do is copy the text from either e-Sword or The Word into Jarte, an RTF editor with Unicode support, color the text (highlighting, change font colors) and take a snapshot of it using ScreenShot Captor, and then edit the graphic file created through Photofiltre.

Once I’ve typed the whole article into AZZCardFile, I export the whole thing into an RTF file. The created RTF file serves me two purposes: it becomes the basis for a PDF document that I can create later one for downloading purposes (in case someone asks me for it), and the text serves as a reference for the places where I can insert my created graphic files in the final webpage. A second time, I export the contents of my AZZCardFile article into .TXT format. This will become the basis for the HTML page I will post at Res Biblica.

When I turn the article into an HTML page, I have two options: if it has graphics, I use RJ Text Edit; with no graphics, I use Fooke’s Notetab. RJ Text Edit has panel view that allows me to locate a graphic file saved in a folder and from there to insert it into a page. It also gives me a Preview of the web page I am creating in either the IE or FireFox view. Notetab does not have these functionalities.

Once finished, the article in HTML format is ready for posting. If it has graphics, I upload them into Res Biblica using AceFTPFree. The rest is simple copy and paste into the text editor of Res Biblica.