Writing programs.

[TheIntelligencePolice]

Just a little question to pass the time.

What programmes do you all use for your writing? And what would you say are the pro's and con's of each?

Myself, personally, I'm rather stuck in my ways with MS Word. I tried Scrivener once, but I couldn't really get into the layout. Maybe I'll give it a try again some time, when I can justify the £40 fee.

 

[Bramandin]

I'm on MS word as well. I had to switch from Libre Office just to be able to word-search within the documents. I get a lot of suggestions for author-specific software due to what I watch on Youtube, but I think I'd have to be interested in wanting to be more organized to really make it worth it. Also it seems that they're browser-based and I don't want to chain my story to the internet.

 

[sknox]

I have no trouble with search in Libre Office. I'm curious about the problem you encountered.

 

[Bramandin]

I have no trouble with search in Libre Office. I'm curious about the problem you encountered.

I'm not nerdy enough to understand it, but I had a fairly competent geek and he switched me from libre or open office to Word.

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

I have both Open Office and Libre Office. Open Office has worked pretty well for me so far. Only thing I wish were better about it is in the area of formatting. There are some features that MS Word has that Open Office doesn't seem to have. I've only had one major issue when using OO where the program froze up horribly along with the rest of my laptop and, after having to shut my laptop off the wrong way, when I tried to reopen the program it was like I was installing it for the very first time and had to go back through the initial setup. This was the malfunction that ate the book that I'm still trying to resurrect. However, I don't think it was necessarily an OO glitch so much as the beginning of that laptop's death spiral.

 

[Wayne Mack]

I use a combination of Libre Office Writer (word processor) and Calc (spreadsheet). I find the spreadsheet useful in keeping chapter synopsis and word count, character and location notes and descriptions, and research notes. This often saves me a great deal of search the main document to ensure I maintain consistency when characters and locations return in later chapters. The primary reason I moved from Open Office to Libre Office was that the latter supported .docx format, while the former only supported through .doc. I keep my writing files in .odf format, though, and it seems to be a more concise storage format. The only thing I even slightly miss from MS Word is the grammar checker.

 

[tde44]

I write and edit with a fountain pen + paper then enter into Word. I use OneNote to hold my character profiles, timelines, and research.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I am more than happy just to use M$ Word for writing - it's rare to come across anyone/other app that can't handle the format.

For notes and research though, I installed a free wiki - Dokuwiki I think.- on my PC. Can be a bit of a pain, if you don't know anything about webservers etc...but reasonably easy to install. Prefer the hyperlinked, non-linear approach with this side of writing.

I'm sure scrivener and all those other worldbuiling apps like campfire do this and have loads of fancy bells and whistles, but 1) they cost hard cash 2) I probably wouldn't use 95% of the other features 3) I am in charge of my own writing domain