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Any suggestions for writing environments for writing a non-fiction book?
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Posted by Franz Grieser
Mar 19, 2007 at 07:47 AM
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
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 19, 2007 at 10:09 AM
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.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Mar 19, 2007 at 11:06 AM
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
Posted by Thomas
Mar 19, 2007 at 01:07 PM
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.