Thursday; computer troubles...

[ozarque]

One of the things that happened when we moved was the discovery that there was no way my antique Macintosh could be made to work in our new apartment. Which means that I now have an iMac with many bells and whistles. That's good -- except when it gets in the way of getting my work done

Comments

[fjm]

I can't manage specifics but autopope is the chap to ask.

[autopope]

I'd say there are three options:

1. OpenOffice/NeoOffice/LibreOffice -- three forks of the OpenOffice open source office suite. Probably not suitable because it's too damn similar to Microsoft Office circa 2003. Pluses: it's free.

2. Apple's Pages program. It's cheap (available from the Mac App Store for about $15) and looks like a solid, fairly full-featured word processor that is firmly Mac-centric and has some page layout capabilities. Can read and write Word documents, but not MacWrite Pro -- for that, you'll need a copy of something like MacLink Plus (a file conversion tool). NB: Pages is the replacement for the word processor in AppleWorks, itself descended from ClarisWorks, which absorbed MacWrite a very long time ago (in computing years).

3. This is not a word processor, but a novel writing toolkit: Scrivener. I'm using it, and so are a bunch of other novelists; it's rather hard to describe what it does, but it combines corkboard/index card views with an outline processor and a word processor and a system for organizing

even more alternatives

[tkil]

This is perhaps getting to extreme, but perhaps ozarque could switch to a text processing system such as LaTeX or DocBook/XML? That would allow her to generate just the text, then let something / someone else worry about formatting.

(This might also be easier for the publisher to handle, depending on what input format they like.)

Although, the last time I looked at publication submission standards for journals and the like, it looks like all but the most technical journals had switched to MS Word submissions...

[skipperdee]

LaTeX's learning curve is extreme enough that I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who *isn't* using it for serious formatting. It's fairly popular in formal linguistics, because it allows the user to seriously control layout of things like syntax trees, and I strongly recommend it for that -- but if you're just looking for a word processing tool that can be picked up and used, it's pretty opaque. Many academic publishers accept it, but I can't imagine that most fiction publishers would regard it with anything other than abject terror.

To me, OpenOffice is a pretty good suggestion -- as autopope notes, it's pretty similar to Office 2003, which is quite similar to most earlier model word processors in interface. I don't have experience with MacWrite, so I can't comment directly upon it, but I started my computing career in Windows Write, and found the transition to Word to be pretty fluid. (I was also 15 at the time, so your mileage may vary.)

[tkil]

LaTeX's learning curve is extreme enough that I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who *isn't* using it for serious formatting.

Oh, I never intended for ozarque to go the full TeX route. I was just responding to the flavor of her original post, where it seemed that "getting the nitty-gritty formatting details correct" was blocking her. Switching to semantic markup of some sort would mitigate that issue entirely.

As an author, it seems it'd be easier to type \thought{What was I thinking?} than to remember whether thoughts were italicized, surrounded by colons, or whatever. But then again, I've never written fiction (or even anything beyond medium-length papers), so my opinion is suspect

Re: even more alternatives

[autopope]

Commercial SF publishers like to receive Word documents. Worse, they expect you to be using Word -- or a work-alike -- these days because they're switching to all-electronic workflow for copy edits and proofreading: change tracking in Word files for copy edits, and PDFs for page proofs.

Re: even more alternatives

[tkil]

Commercial SF publishers ... [are] switching to all-electronic workflow for copy edits and proofreading: change tracking in Word files for copy edits, and PDFs for page proofs.

Alas.

Beats killing trees, I guess.