Anything but Scrivener, please!

RBEmerson

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I'm currently using Libre Writer, which is nice for putting words in files and writing tech manuals. It's not cooperative with stepping through whole pages at a shot, the find/replace target text can't contain common punctuation, needs a work-around for chapter numbering, etc., whiny, etc.

I tried Scrivener and realized it was a full-time career to figure it out, even following the full tutorial. Worse, it's pretty much "our way or the highway".

Is there anything that a) doesn't require an annual rental fee (I can't buy it? I have to pay annually until h*** freezes over?), b) isn't cloud-based (nothing like sitting in a camp site in the middle of the Sonoran desert to understand the meaning of the phrase "dark zone") and c) is flexible about "how I write"?
 

Maryn

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I'm surprised you find Libre Office inadequate. I don't have the problems you report--I can find and replace text containing punctuation, for instance, and it's not a hardship to number my chapters as I write them. I don't know what you mean by "stepping through pages," but scrolling, page down, and go to page x are all functional. The only issue I've had with it is that I can't figure out how to renumber the pages correctly for scripts with a title page and scene/character list page, so the third page is actually page one.

Whiny how? And how much better do you expect a free program to be? If you want better features, buy something.

Maryn, who gets books published using Libre Office
 

lizmonster

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I understand the reluctance to pay for Office 365 (I loathe the rental model that seems to be everywhere in software these days), but I do, and tbh I think it's a reasonable investment. For one thing, everyone in trade publishing works in Word, so if you've got trade on your mind, it doesn't hurt to get used to Word's workflow. (FWIW I tried LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and both had subtle incompatibilities with Word's Track Changes feature.)

Also, I don't know what platform you're on, but since Office 2016 (I think?), it's worked quite nicely on the Mac. It's not perfect (nothing is!), but it's pretty solid.
 

RBEmerson

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"Whiny" as in I'm being whiny. Or whinging. Choose one. Or both.


Find "Harry's nose", for example, just won't fly, even when I can see it just below the cursor. Or how about "señora" should be "señorita"?

I can generate chapter numbers by modifying a Style, but it's at best a work-around. I shudder think what would happen if I wanted to create an index such as Chapter 1. Harry is Born, Chapter 2. Harry Gets a Big Nose ,etc. etc. Adding a Chapter heading in the text is... nope.

Getting a page to advance to "top of page at top of screen" when tapping the <PG DN> key seems to be, based on current results from the Libre forum, missing in action.

Slinging words into Writer works (I currently have a monster at 120K words), but too often it's just plain frustrating to use for ...ah-hem... literary creativity. Tech manuals with lots of 1, 1.2, 1.2.III, 1.2.III.a and Writer is my friend. For "It was the best of Westerns, it was the worst of Westerns"... not so much.
 

Maryn

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The search function has changed since the last update, looks like. I see what the problem is but not an obvious work-around. When I type Andrew's into the search box on a large document that definitely contains it, I'm getting straight apostrophes and quotes, single or double, but my manuscript has curly quotes. Therefore it can't find a match. I imagine if a search for nose isn't enough, you might be able to mess with inserting a curly apostrophe.

Let me go see if I can make that work...

Edit: It won't add a character to the search box, but it lets me paste it. So I can type Andrew's (or copy the one I see in the text) and get my curly quote, then copy-and-paste it into the search, and it takes the curly quote with it. Not exactly elegant. I'm absolutely positive I've searched for possessives in Libre Office before and had no issue.

Maryn, who wrote a character named James who owned things
 
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RBEmerson

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Oops... Win10 - latest & greatest rev. as of this past Tuesday (the day MickeySoft pushes improvements to the willing and unwilling alike). If I found the needed bits and pieces under Linux, I'd leave MickeySoft sooooo far behind. I whinge.

The main problem with Libre is it's open source. As a result, there places of astounding brilliance, and places that are less so. Eg. the find function apparently regressing. Anything that needs clever work-arounds to so something fundamental is not Good News.
 

VeryBigBeard

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LO Find & Replace can do a lot more if you open up the full dialogue box and set the parameters in there. It can actually handle pretty complex variables. The F&R box on the toolbar is a quick facsimile for finding the nearest word, and is not built for parsing special characters.

But between this and your other Libre thread, I think the issue is you're way, way over your head into formatting that you do not need. You do not need to format indices or chapter headings for standard MS submission. In fact, you are going to have to pull all these things out before you sub to an agent or publisher. You do need page numbers and a basic heading--both of which LO can do in two clicks--but in this day and age, I wouldn't sweat it if they don't look perfect. They're for easy reference in a slushpile or reading stack, not the final product. If you want chapter titles: centre-align --> two hard returns --> Chapter # --> hard return --> Chapter Title --> two more hard returns --> left-align --> words. Anything else is likely to get mangled further down the line.

Book layout is its own discipline. It takes a very great deal of time to learn, like any discipline. It typically uses specialized software which can work around these problems, often more quickly, but yes, you have to learn to do it the software's way because the specialized software is the equivalent of a F1 racecar, and you wouldn't take it out to get groceries.

Scrivener is not specialized layout software either. It's aimed at people who are serious about writing fiction with commercial profligacy. I don't use it, partly because of the learning curve you mention, but I don't take it personally because it's not aimed at me or my process. Subscription software is an evil, but it makes much more sense as a business model for specialized software, and it allows L&L, which makes Scrivener (ETA: which isn't subscription--I got confused), to work more closely with its users on the features they want.
 
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Oops... Win10 - latest & greatest rev. as of this past Tuesday (the day MickeySoft pushes improvements to the willing and unwilling alike). If I found the needed bits and pieces under Linux, I'd leave MickeySoft sooooo far behind. I whinge.

The main problem with Libre is it's open source. As a result, there places of astounding brilliance, and places that are less so. Eg. the find function apparently regressing. Anything that needs clever work-arounds to so something fundamental is not Good News.

Install the Help files, if you haven't. Meanwhile: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/Writer/054
 

cbenoi1

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Is there anything that a) doesn't require an annual rental fee (I can't buy it? I have to pay annually until h*** freezes over?), b) isn't cloud-based (nothing like sitting in a camp site in the middle of the Sonoran desert to understand the meaning of the phrase "dark zone") and c) is flexible about "how I write"?

yWriter 6.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter6.html

-cb
 

RBEmerson

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JimRac

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Scrivener is not specialized layout software either. It's aimed at people who are serious about writing fiction with commercial profligacy. I don't use it, partly because of the learning curve you mention, but I don't take it personally because it's not aimed at me or my process. Subscription software is an evil, but it makes much more sense as a business model for specialized software, and it allows L&L, which makes Scrivener, to work more closely with its users on the features they want.
(emphasis mine)
Apologies for jumping in. I may have misunderstood this statement, but it implied to me that Scrivener is subscription-based, which it most definitely is not.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/store/scrivener?tab=macOS

Best,
Jim
 

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Scrivener is not specialized layout software either. It's aimed at people who are serious about writing fiction with commercial profligacy. I don't use it, partly because of the learning curve you mention, but I don't take it personally because it's not aimed at me or my process. Subscription software is an evil, but it makes much more sense as a business model for specialized software, and it allows L&L, which makes Scrivener, to work more closely with its users on the features they want.

Scrivener is a licensed app, not a subscription.

It is in fact a very generous license. It's also not just for "commercial fiction." I use if for scholarly and technical writing; and I know a lot of my colleagues do as well. I've taught online seminars for grad student who want to use Scrivener for dissertation writing and research.
 

VeryBigBeard

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Scrivener is a licensed app, not a subscription.

It is in fact a very generous license. It's also not just for "commercial fiction." I use if for scholarly and technical writing; and I know a lot of my colleagues do as well. I've taught online seminars for grad student who want to use Scrivener for dissertation writing and research.

For some reason, I thought it was subscription--sorry. Did it change at some point? Either that or I just got confused. I've had a few people recommend it to me for different reasons and different features at different times. From what I've seen of it, it's well-designed and absolutely capable of doing a variety of things, in much the same way CELTX is/was for script work, but has developed into a whole suite of different applications, some more useful than others. I didn't intend to suggest otherwise, just that it's very much professional-level software.
 

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For some reason, I thought it was subscription--sorry. Did it change at some point? Either that or I just got confused. I've had a few people recommend it to me for different reasons and different features at different times. From what I've seen of it, it's well-designed and absolutely capable of doing a variety of things, in much the same way CELTX is/was for script work, but has developed into a whole suite of different applications, some more useful than others. I didn't intend to suggest otherwise, just that it's very much professional-level software.

Nope; it's always been a license. You do have to have a specific license for each OS (iOS, macOS, Windows) but the terms are about the most reasonable I've ever seen.
 

VeryBigBeard

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Yeah, I went and checked after you posted. It's very good.

I'd love to see a writing program that's fully extendable by the community, but that's really a whole different idea. One person who recced Scrivener to me compared it to the Unity game engine, I think mostly for the learning curve and broad feature set, but for me what really makes Unity click is that it's completely plug&play, which is one (not the only) reason it's become so popular with small indie devs versus, say, Unreal. A lot of the best Unity games completely rip out the engine and replace it, sometimes to the point it's genuinely hard to tell if it was made with Unity. The basic functions are all built to be removed.

To extend my previous metaphor, it's like ordering an F1 racecar and instead you get a frame you can customize at great time and expense, but it'll do exactly what the course needs come race time.

(Unity also has a smart little licensing scheme where it's free to use for basic features but the logo remains, which gave Unity its ubiquity in the community and, thus, better extensions, while simultaneously branding freely-made games in with the clones and asset flips churned out by beginners. There are a variety of full versions, some of which work per-project, which can really help indie teams just starting out.)

How useful that structure would be for writers is going to be highly, highly dependent on one's own process, particularly how much time/effort one has to spend customizing said process, which can very quickly become a distraction from actual writing. Whereas part of what I like about game dev is the fusing of different disciplines, which is exactly what makes Unity's model so useful.
 

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I'd love to see a writing program that's fully extendable by the community, but that's really a whole different idea. .

That's the entire point of LibreOffice; it is in fact extendable by the community because it's Open Source. And it has been extended, largely via plugins.
 

VeryBigBeard

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That's partly why I like LibreOffice :)

I wish I could compare the appeal of Unity properly, but I don't have the technical know-how, only what I've seen in action and picked up by osmosis. The bit I remember best is that the objects are governed from the bottom-up by individual objects' components rather than being controlled by global constraints and definitions. Practically, there's no inherent order to anything, which lets you radically change the way the plug-ins interact with the existing program and each other.

I am probably not doing it justice, or making any sense, but this is fairly off-topic anyhow. Sorry.

In honour of this conversation, Evernote has just offered me 40% off....
 

RBEmerson

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I've started a new project under yWriter7. I'm ambivalent about it.
It's forced a change in how I tell my story. I'm undecided if that's good news or bad news.
Finding an easy way to view the work fully is far too challenging. Think LO on a bad day.
Lack of real time spell checking is a problem, as is the occasional crash or what seems to be crash tied to checking spelling.
I'll keep at it, but I can't say as I'm overwhelmed.
 

RBEmerson

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I hadn't heard of until your post. For now, I'm in yWriter7 but I'm open to changes. Thanks for mentioning these possibilities. :)
 

VeryBigBeard

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If the spellchecker is crashing, I'd wonder a bit about CPU or RAM usage. You said you're on Win10, right?

Is anything else on the machine crashing intermittently? No word processor should be running so heavy on its own that a spellcheck dialogue causes crashes.

To check your usage, right-click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager. You may have to click the arrow at the bottom for more details. If you're near max, try closing any background programs. Google Chrome is often a culprit if it's been running too long--closing it and clearing your browser cache can reduce strain on the system.

Make sure your OS and any drivers are up to date, too. Consider running a malware/spyware scan if you haven't recently.
 

RBEmerson

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Trust me, it isn't the machine. I do some fairly serious video editing with Resolve (what some of the big boys use, not just the YT crowd), and routinely do major image manipulation with DxO. Neither bring the machine to its knees. Suffice it I have virus, etc.checkers in depth. In Win 10-land, updates are hard to avoid. Every Tuesday MickeySoft pushes another opportunity to break Win 10 or otherwise "improve it".

As a lesser benchmark Libre Office doesn't cause the least of problems.

It may be I should have installed yWriter6. I'm seeing posts in the yWriter group that 7 isn't as stable as I expected.
 

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Libre Office is a good substitute for Word, depending on what you want to do. For sparse formatting (e.g. an ebook) it's fine, but for advanced formatting, like a technical report or manual (I write those by the way) you get what you pay for. I don't need to pay for Word because I have it through work anyway, but even if I did need to, I do way too much writing to give up ease of use over a hundred and some quid for a perma license.
 

RBEmerson

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FWIW yWriter has one writing session killer related to the circumstance a word is clicked on. Moral: back up, back up, back up

The entire project remains. The scene just worked on pfft! after the last save. :mad:

Overall, yWriter triggers, in me, a sense of being almost straitjacketed. Any given chapter has to be written in scenes. I found I was almost writing sub-chapters or... no flow in the chapter.

The piece I worked on, when I read an entire chapter, felt choppy.

Reading so much as a single chapter inside yWriter is AFAIK simply not supported. The work has to go to a PDF or RTF. Proofing, spotting MC has a pistol here, a truncheon there... not gonna happen.

I suppose the location, character, item, etc. makes some folks warm and fuzzy. I can carry that in my head or do a quick scroll back to "what did I say he had". The pistol/truncheon thing is, for me, a typo (found an example on the last proofreading run - meh).

Overall, for me, 6, maybe 7 out of 10.

YMMV