I'm about to start writing a book, if I can ever get the energy to be in a non-prone position. The book (I sure hope it's longer than a pamphlet!) will have a very short bibliography (probably < 10 items)), will have examples in the form of diagrams, but probably will not include mathmatical expressions.

Some of "us folk" have suggested

Liquid Story Binder, Journal, NoteMap, and others that I don't recall.

Any suggestions of other software and any comments on the pros & cons of the various programs would be useful.AND APPRECIATED.

Thanks,

-c

Cassius,

I can recommend two applciations to look at:

IdeaMason v3
You can manage all your material including the references and the writing in one applcation. It is research oriented and good for academic writing. The composition too is worth to look at. A big plus of IM is that you can first collect and categorize your material in seperate chunks. When you have finished research and initial writing you then can turn to the composition tool and arrange the material into the correct order in an outline.
http://www.ideamason.com/

WhizFolders Pro Deluxe
It is developed for the writer. You don't have a reference system but with around ten references you can manage them in manually. A very nice feature of Whizfolders is that you can export/print the topics without theier titles. Additionally, Whizfolders prints a table of content. What I am not sure is how stable it is when you add a lot of pictures and diagrams.
http://www.whizfolders.com/


Take the time to took at these two tools and then decide.
I wish you all the best with your book project!

Dominik

I have tested many during previous few days, though very shortly, and stayed with IdeaMason. It fits my world, allows to enter any random snippets, and later on to construct whole book from them. It also allows to reuse those snippets, and work on more projects within one database (which is good if they are on similar topic).
It doesn't impose any structure on writer, as some other tools do (though those were mostly targetted at fiction writers).

I'm not yet that far to say, but I understood with IdeaMason it's best to export final draft into MS Word (or any other) and do the finishing touches there.

I became envious to see what Mac platform has available for writing, but switching is not an option yet.

Cassius

I'm about to start writing a book, if I can ever get the energy to be in a non-prone
position. The book (I sure hope it's longer than a pamphlet!) will have a very short
bibliography (probably < 10 items)), will have examples in the form of diagrams, but
probably will not include mathmatical expressions.

I also recommend Ideamason (I haven´t used Whizfolders so I cannot say anything about that). Depending on the length of the project, more precisely, on how complex your outline will be, you may want to use Notemap for outlining or a mind-mapping tool such as Mind Manager, Mind Genius or even Freemind for brainstorming. The outliner in IM is basic compared to Notemap but does the job. You simply have to add a new "idea" (i.e. a note) for each element of your outline. Handling these means a bit more manual work than in a "real" outliner and you cannot import an outline from Notemap or any other application (at least, I haven't managed to get one in).

Inserting graphics is straightforward: Just drag them from the Windows Explorer into an "idea" window and place them. I usually only put place holders for the images in the IM file and replace them in OpenOffice.or Writer by references to the graphics files (I don't want and need the images in the text file while I still edit it as this blows the file size up and makes working in the Writer or Word file slow). But you can keep images in IM and export them to Word or Writer.

One more thing: You should have a fast Windows machine for Ideamason 3.1, or a fast graphical adapter. IM3.x uses a lot of windows that make redrawing on slower machines a drag. On the 1.1 GHz PC I use for my work opening a new idea window takes 3-4 seconds. That's why I always keep an empty idea window open for typing in new notes so I do not have to wait for the window to open.

Franz

In the Windows world, another vote for IdeaMason. It's very good for all the reasons given above, with a flexible but not over-complicated UI, and the general direction of its development as indicated by its creators ("road map" would be too precise a term) suggests that it's going to get even better. The only contra-indication is its price, but I think that is justified.

In the Mac world, a vote for Scrivener - a real writer's tool. It seems most suited to fiction, but I believe it has been used for all kinds of factual writing (and can cope with endnotes and footnotes). Its development seems to be a model of good practice, with a clear overall vision, but highly responsive on the details. Like IdeaMason, it doesn't claim to be a word-processor and needs MS Word or similar (there are cheaper WPs in the Mac world) to prepare drafts for printing or despatch to an editor. After an extensive series of betas, Version 1 has just been released to pretty much universal acclaim. It's also very reasonably priced, if you already possess a Mac equipped with OS X.

There's a nice story associated with it: its creator tried lots of other writing tools for both PCs and Macs. He couldn't find one he liked, so taught himself Cocoa in order to build one for himself.

I too have tried all sorts of other writing tools, intended-for and adapted. Though many are adequate, in the current state of the market these two are by far the best.

Hugh.

We seem to have similar preferences. I also use Scrivener on my Mac (I also thought about recommending it here).

Franz

Hallo Franz,

We seem to have similar preferences. I also use Scrivener on my Mac (I also
thought about recommending it here).

you were a proponent of IdeaMason. What made you to switch to Mac/Scrivener, if I can ask?

Thomas

you were a proponent of IdeaMason.
What made you to switch to Mac/Scrivener, if I can ask?

I have to use Windows machines for my work. And there I use Ideamason for non-fiction projects (recently for a series of articles, now for a new book project).

For fiction, I switched to the Mac and Scrivener. Scrivener is an almost ideal tool for fiction writing, and I wanted something different for my private writing ("different" meaning a different look and feel, thus the switch to the Mac).

Franz

Thanks for explanation!

I would also recommend IdeaMason for any non-fiction writing.

Hi.

I think I should add two things concerning Ideamason. I wrote:

One more thing: You should have a fast Windows machine for
Ideamason 3.1, or a fast graphical adapter. IM3.x uses a lot of windows that make
redrawing on slower machines a drag. On the 1.1 GHz PC I use for my work opening a new idea
window takes 3-4 seconds. That's why I always keep an empty idea window open for typing
in new notes so I do not have to wait for the window to open.

The "IM3.x uses a lot of windows" may be misleading: It does NOT clutter the screen with a lot of windows. I find IM has a very clean interface.
It is just that many of the GUI elements are "window elements", and - as Masonware says - these make screen display slower.

Here is what Victoria from Masonware answered to my question why IM3.x is slower than IM2.2 on my machine:

"The dashboard opening is slower than in 2.2 because of the new window layout and panel configuration. The 2.2 version of the dashboard was a single pane. There were tabs but they were just tabs not windows within a window. The new dashboard is literally a number of layered windows because now the tabs are all movable and dockable within the interface. As you would imagine this puts an additional burden on the screen resources. Of course you have to weigh the advantages of the new interface against the 3 extra seconds it takes to load."

She also recommended I close all elements I do not need to improve speed:

"Considering what I said below about the dashboard multi-layered new window configuration – you, as the user, can increase the speed of the dashboard load. Since the load time is a factor of the number of different windows in a dashboard you can close some of the windows it loads and save up to a couple of seconds, even get it back to the 1 second mark. I know you don't always use sources in your work so you could close the Sources side panel – just click on the x mark in the top right corner of the panel. You could also close the footnotes if you don't use that panel – just click on the footnotes tab and click on the X on the far right of the tab line. You can always bring these panels back into play from the windows menu at any time."

This helped. Though opening a new idea window still takes several seconds on my old workhorse. Victoria suggested in their support forum that the reason for that might be a very old Windows installation (which is true in my case, I will try IM on another machine in April).

Franz

Cassius wrote:

I'm about to start writing a book, if I can ever get the energy to be in a non-prone
position. The book (I sure hope it's longer than a pamphlet!) will have a very short
bibliography (probably < 10 items)), will have examples in the form of diagrams, but
probably will not include mathmatical expressions.

Some of "us folk" have
suggested

Liquid Story Binder, Journal, NoteMap, and others that I don't
recall.

Any suggestions of other software and any comments on the pros & cons of the
various programs would be useful.AND APPRECIATED.

Thanks,

An opinion no one will agree with - I think for a large scale non-fiction writing project, the best writing environment is MS Word, particularly its latest incarnation. Of course you would apply a lot of other tools, but Word wil have the best general connectivity and the greatest variety of options for general writing.

Stephen

An opinion no one will agree with - I think for a large scale non-fiction writing project,
the best writing environment is MS Word, particularly its latest incarnation. Of
course you would apply a lot of other tools, but Word wil have the best general
connectivity and the greatest variety of options for general writing.

I use OpenOffice.org Writer for writing and Ideamason for managing the project. I copy and paste text between Writer and Ideamason or import .doc files (from Writer or Word) into Ideamason. Though the editor in Ideamason 3.x has improved a lot compared to v2.2, I prefer "my" writing environment in Writer (e.g. word completion, boiler plate, macros, the better spell checker).

Off course, you could use Microsoft Word instead of Writer. Word is one of the export formats in Ideamason.

Franz

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

An
opinion no one will agree with - I think for a large scale non-fiction writing project,
the best writing environment is MS Word, particularly its latest incarnation.

I can agree with that as everybody has different style. I can't imagine using Word for anything besides finishing touches (though I haven't seen the latest version), as my style is to write lots of short unconnected text and only glue it all together in the final stage - for that style IdeaMason seems best fit so far.

And yes, IdeaMason feels a bit bulky running on older machines, I got similar suggestions from Victoria as well. It will be probably the only .NET based software that I will voluntarily run on my PC.