![]() No matter what you submit, they will probably import it into a different format. Your book might be reprinted in different formats. They change the layout based on the book format they choose. ![]() Some of that feeling may be due to my own experience having been (mostly) limited to scientific content but I would myself not immediately advise LaTeX for your purposes. The more creative you get the greater a pain in the butt LaTeX becomes so if you are talking about a book with creatively placed illustrations with flowing text around them or some such I'd quickly feel that a standard WYSIWYG word processor is going to be a better match. Illustrations are not a problem but doing other than say grid placing a few of them may well be. Used, I would say, fairly specifically non-creatively that is, almost as the entire point of the system, and that shows. LaTeX is indeed mostly geared towards scientific content, mathematical formulae most primarily, and is fairly specifically used by writers of such documents so as to concentrate on the content, while producing a standard, uniform but still good looking and correct result. Combined with FocusWriter, this gives me all the features I shall probably ever need.Certainly you can use LaTeX for a general book and with or without illustrations but it's frankly probably not the best of ideas. To keep track of character-names, locations, chronology and whatnot I use a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet running in another workspace. AutoHotkey does the same for Windows users. Pretty much anything you can do with the keyboard or mouse can be assigned to a hot-key. Thus if I press Alt-S (Linux) or Ctrl-S (Mac), the word “said” appears at the cursor keys Z, X and C are reserved for the names of the three principal characters in any story, etc. These allow one to define, among other things, customized keystrokes. On a sidenote, I also use AutoKey (Linux) and Keyboard Maestro (Mac). Until recently I used PyRoom as a distraction-free editor (see here), but bemoaned the lack of a search function and devised a clunky workaround. The way the program counts words and the nominal number of words to a page are also configurable. These are configurable and can display word-count, number of pages, number of paragraphs, and/or number of characters. A status bar also becomes visible then, showing you statistics. You can have multiple files open at once, selectable via a tab-bar that appears when you move the mouse pointer to the bottom of the screen. Besides plain text, FocusWriter will load and save in rich text (.rtf) and Open Document (.odt) formats, so you can preserve italics, bold, superscript, etc.Ĥ. A motivation tool that lets you set a daily work-target (time spent or words written).ģ. A decent spelling checker with the option to check as you write.Ģ. There are other features which for me are not so important but you might value:ġ. It is free to download and use, though I strongly recommend “tipping” Mr Gott because he has put a great deal of thought and effort into this program over the last six years and is still developing it. FocusWriter supports smart quotes (including global replace of straight with curly quotes) and allows for easy insertion of special characters.Ĩ. These settings are switchable using keystrokes, so you can quickly turn highlighting off when you move from editing to reviewing.ħ. You can also highlight the three current lines, or the entire current paragraph. The line currently being edited can be highlighted or rather, the other lines can be dimmed. A single keystroke will select a whole scene: useful when counting words.Ħ. Keystrokes allow you to move a scene up or down in the navigator and hence in the text.ĥ. If you move the mouse pointer to the left of the screen, you can access a navigation bar which shows the first line or two of every “scene” in your text, the start of a scene being definable by any string you choose. ![]() If you move the mouse pointer to the right of the screen, a scroll-bar appears.Ĥ. customizations of the display) and easily switch between them.ģ. You can define any number of “themes” (i.e. I have a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop.Ģ. It runs under Linux, Windows and Apple’s OS X. It has the following extra advantages for me:ġ. Find-and-replace (with regular expressions if possible).įocusWriter by Graeme Gott provides all this and much more. This is most important to me, since plain text can easily be loaded into a tablet or e-reader, or converted (for example with jEdit) into html or simply edited with another app.Ĥ. Ability to load and save plain text, with normal access to the filing system. Choice of any installed display font, colours and spacing, plus automatic indentation of first line of paragraph.ģ. I think I have found the perfect software for writers – for this writer, at least.Ģ.
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