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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a programmer, please forgive me, but I love using Sublime as a writing tool for legislation and public policy in my work. The color coding system popular in programming, has been invaluable in drafting legislation...

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I'm curious about your use case, care to elaborate a bit more?

That color coding system you mention is for code syntax, so I'm picturing that Sublime for a text document might highlight seemingly random words used in coding (function, end, do, etc), and it doesn't seem so useful. So I'm geninuely curious.

The highlighting can be customised to do pretty much anything you want. I imagine OP does something like highlighting "should" a different colour to "must" and things like that.

I too am curious about details though.

How prevalent is the use of non-Word tools in drafting legislation? At Open Law Library[1], we're building a linter for legislation drafting as a Word plugin under the assumption that most drafting is done in Word. Would love to learn more about your process (vchuang at openlawlib dot org).

[1] www.openlawlib.org

I've started writing a novel in Sublime using Markdown syntax with a spell check plugin and word wrap. Not sure if you're doing something different for legislation, but I imagine that setup would work pretty well for documents with lots of sections, bullet points, etc.

Also curious. Do you use soft wraps or hard wraps when dealing with text?

Further legislative text has a lot of resemblance to code.

Wow, great!

Are there any plugins / modes for writing structured natural language text that you use? How do they help? What's missing?

What's to forgive? This is way cool.

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