Writing software.

[fixmaster]

Haven't seen it mentioned yet hope I didn't miss it. RoughDraft is a good free program designed for writers. hope it helped

Sorry i am a newb cant post links yet. I have no affiliation with that program just a happy users and the price is right. just type in RoughDraft in google and you will find it easy.

[SNG]

Originally Posted by fixmaster

Haven't seen it mentioned yet hope I didn't miss it. RoughDraft is a good free program designed for writers. hope it helped

Sorry i am a newb cant post links yet. I have no affiliation with that program just a happy users and the price is right. just type in RoughDraft in google and you will find it easy.

RoughDraft seems to be quite writer-friendly, perhaps even more so than MS Word (still trying it out). Really like its simplistic layout, the "Pad" feature; plus it's freeware.

[limubai2000]

I've been using ywriter and then dropping the text files from that into Word for final editing. I love ywriter because you can edit chapters and scenes individually and it presents your work to you in much more organized fashion than staring at a megalithically long word doc.

OpenOffice is coming of age but it's not quite there for me yet.

[jezelf]

I have New Novelist - though I have had a play about with it, it seemed a bit too formulaic at first, but good to begin with and get the process going and get some structure in place, then work into it.

Mostly using Open Office Org - it's free! (version 3 out now). I like Word, but have yet to get the spare money for MS Office. OOOrg is just fine for me at this time.

I generally hand write lot my inital ideas in my A4, 400 page lined,hardback books I picked up at a book shop (and on more mobile friendly pocket note books) Then copy those notes to my OOOrg doc, adding more detail refining and cross references etc - means you can add photos or other inspirations or reference, sketches into your notes as you go. It's amazing how much depth you can add doing something like this.

I look forward to getting all my notes on my laptop, so I can cut and paste and cross reference and index things so they are easier to find, edit, refine and not forgotten - will take a while though! Start refining and you create half a dozen background characters, which inspire their own little stories. can be quite fun, though.

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by Daniel Hetberg

I can heartily recommend LaTeX. It's basically a scripting language that does the formatting for you.

To keep this short, let me refer you to what I wrote here and here concerning getting set up.

Your first link doesn't work and, if it was intended to go to another thread, I'd be happy to follow it.

I haven't used LaTeX, as I think of it as being particularly suited to typesetting mathematical formulas but, yeah, plain text or marking up plain text is the only way to go (I use vim as my text editor).