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Writing tool for MacOs, or for Windows-a question.
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Posted by jamesofford
Aug 1, 2010 at 03:38 PM
After many years of just thinking nervously about it, I have decided to try my hand at doing some writing. I mean, more than just posting to boards like this and writing emails and memos at work.
Years ago, a boss of mine commented that I would never improve my writing until I got good at using the computer for writing. He was a scientist, and when he meant good at writing, he meant good at writing papers for publication in journals. For that he used Microsoft Word. When I am writing these days, I continue to start the process by doing it longhand. I find that writing things out with a pen allows me to get my thoughts out with the least amount of foofraw getting in the way. I then use this first draft as the starting point for my computer draft. For many things, I will continue to do things with a pen, but I am beginning to agree with my former boss that if I want to do some serious laying down of words I need to do it on a computer. Plus, I need to have the ability to rewrite easily.
I have about 4 papers to write at work. These will be submitted for publication. I am going to begin using some of my free time to do some outside of work writing. The goal of this is publication as well, but a different type of publication. Not in scientific journals. Either on the web, or through some other venue, I haven’t figured that out yet.
Now to the question-I am looking for something that doesn’t have all of the gewgaws that something like Word does, but I am looking for something that is more capable than something like texedit on the Mac or Notepad on Windows. Stuff like spellcheckers, some rudimentary formatting, and a few other tools would be nice. Since this is the Outlinersoftware forum, then integrated outlining would be nice. Also the ability to generate a file with a clean format.
Right now, my home computer(the one this is being written on) is a MacBook. I use a PC at work running Windows XP. I am thinking of buying another PC to use just as a writing machine. My company has a program that allows us to buy machines that have been replaced for pretty cheap. That one won’t have all of the stuff that I have on my other computers that can distract me from just writing.
Any suggestions?
Not asking for much am I?
Jim.
Posted by Cassius
Aug 1, 2010 at 09:08 PM
If you already have Word, one possibility is to just prune the menus and tool bars. Word (at least for Windows, probably for Mac) has the ability to customize the menus and tool bars, adding or deleting items.
Beyond this, there is a plethora of word processors that can read Word .doc and .rtf formats.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 1, 2010 at 10:06 PM
Well, for the MacBook let me be the first in a long list of people who will recommend the amazing Scrivener. There are many of us who switched to a Mac mostly so we could have access to Scrivener.
It isn’t perfect, but it’s as close to perfect as I’ve seen. It is well thought out, well supported, and has a very active community of users. I won’t go into detail, because you can check it out at
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/
Steve
Posted by Mitchell Kastner
Aug 1, 2010 at 11:15 PM
It depends upon what type of writing you are going to do.
If you need to include citations and a bibliography, then I strongly suggest you try the relational database Brilliant: http://www.brilliantdatabase.com. Brilliant allows you to create folders into which you can store note records created from your research of technical or academic journals and books. Just like in Windows Explorer, Brilliant allows you to nest many levels of subfolders and to move, copy, demote, and promote the folders just as you would in Windows Explorer. (This involves more dragging and dropping than I am used to in the outliner software I use.) Relating tables, called forms in Brilliant, is a snap. There is a one-to-many relationship between the Articles table I created an the Research Notes table I created. Ditto for the relationship between the Books table and the Research Notes table. There is a many to many relationship between the Authors table and the Articles and Books table since one author can write many books and articles and since one article or book can have many authors. The key difference between Brilliant and every single other relational database manager are the folders which I use as levels in an outline. Each folder is a topic and I can drill down to as many subfolders/subtopics as I wish.
Mitchell Kastner, Esq.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 2, 2010 at 05:03 AM
For the Windows world, the recently discussed Sense http://www.silvaelm.co.uk/ is a tool worth investigating. Another writer-oriented word processor that has been praised here is PageFour http://www.softwareforwriting.com/pagefour.html
SuperNoteCard http://www.mindola.com/snc/index.html is available for both Mac and Windows. Its paradigm—structuring cards to assemble the full text- is well suited to various kinds of writing.
An interesting tool, currently under development, is Storybox http://www.storyboxsoftware.com I mention this more as reference, as it has not reached version 1 yet, though one can already work with it.
Last but not least, Storybook http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/ and yWriter http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html are two free / open source tools available for Windows and Linux.