Is there a writing program like this?

One double-spaced page in Word in a 12 pt font, Times new Roman is about as many words as there'd be in a page of a printed book. I know it's not exactly what you want but I hope it helps put perspective on things a little.

There might be some way of flipping the pages in word from portrait to landscape. And you could divide the page into two and use a handwriting-style font.

Hmm. Will have a fiddle with word and see if this is possible...

Reading mode is similar, depending on the size of your screen. Intead of scrolling, you move by page. Bigger the monitor, the more words on the page... but that's not that different from how the page size of your publisher will affect the words on the page.

You can also set Page Setup to do book fold (under the Portrait/Landscape, there's a drop box for Multiple Pages) and set your view for two such pages.

Do you have MS Word 2007? If so, the answer's yes.

I'm not sure what you mean by texture, but you can mess around in the Format-->Background menus. Go to Fill Effects. Under textures there's a parchment. You might even look for a picture (like a jpg) of a piece of paper or book page and you can use that as your background. If you do the jpg and it's a large size file, that can slow the computer just a bit.

Maybe that will work for you.

Hurrah!

Go to page layout at the top of your screen.

Then click on page colour.

Fill effects.

Then texture.

And choose!

You can print the texture/background as well but I'd advise against it - takes ages and wastes ink. But it looks pretty.

I type on the 'stationery' background.

Word 2k7 has many, many toys to fritter away the time. Second best procrastination tool I've found. (Don't start messing with the picture effects... I mean. ;-)

Interesting.

For those here who aren't so application savvy, any chance someone could provide step-by-step instructions by means of screenshots? I know that there'd be many people who'd go for this 'trick'.

Thanks.

Word 2003 Instructions

The screenshots are for Word2003. I'll put the Word2007 instructions in ().

Go to File--> Page Setup
There, find "Multiple Pages" and in the drop box select "Bookfold"


(In Word2k7, go to Page Layout Tab. In the Page Setup box, find the little arrow at the bottom left, under the Hyphenation command. This will open the same dialog box that Word2003 uses.)

Bookfold will make your page landscape. If you were to print, you could fold the pages (or cut them) and put them together like a book.

Now, let's see both pages.
Go to the view drop box and pick Two Pages. If this is too small, after you have selected Two Page view, you can zoom in.



(Word 2k7, this is on the View Ribbon, in the Zoom group.)

Okay. Read to apply a texture?
Go to Format--> Background --> Other Fill Options


In this dialog box, you can change the colors or even go the Texture and select, say Parchment or Stationary. If you wanted, you could go get other imagse (jpgs) of say, paper, and pick one of those.


(In Word2k7, you can go to Page Layout Ribbon, find Page Color and get the above dialog box.)