Adam Robinson—
What is the best OpenSource word processing program for a Mac? Does your writing utility affect your writing?
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Meta
i dig Open Office
I mostly just use TextEdit right now (I have a student copy of word 08 but it’s the worst iteration of word I’ve ever used). So I’m interested in this question as well.
I don’t think the app I use does anything for or against my writing, though. Actually, that might be untrue. When I open word and have to go through a series of settings adjustments every time to make sure my writing comes out formatted the way I want on my first try, that generally makes me start writing in a bad mood. So maybe.
Use this:
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
while running this:
http://macfreedom.com/
to get the most done. worth the price.
Open Office is, in my eyes, the only realistic option. It works more or less like MS Word, and does a good job of showing me how the page will look, which is something I can’t do without. It handles Word docs and all the other wacky formats, can make pdfs, etc. It’s pretty fast on Windows, a little more sluggish on Macs.
My software affects me tremendously. I simply can’t write in the wrong program, though I do use gmail to compose a few things, and I’ve wondered about Googledocs.
I really just want to know what the best application is. Thanks!
Can’t go wrong: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
Version 2.0 coming out soon. Really is an upgrade to word processing, not just another feature-heavy lipstick on a pig iteration of Word.
i dig Open Office
I mostly just use TextEdit right now (I have a student copy of word 08 but it’s the worst iteration of word I’ve ever used). So I’m interested in this question as well.
I don’t think the app I use does anything for or against my writing, though. Actually, that might be untrue. When I open word and have to go through a series of settings adjustments every time to make sure my writing comes out formatted the way I want on my first try, that generally makes me start writing in a bad mood. So maybe.
Right, but since everyone else uses Word, does Scrivener handle .doc as well as Open Office? I guess this question is for Jak, too.
text edit rulz
Didn’t you all post about Ommwriter here not long ago? http://www.ommwriter.com/
I dig Ommwriter but I’d have trouble thinking of it as my primary text editor.
I just finished a novel in TextEdit. (The edit/rewrite pass — the first draft was on a typewriter.)
I swore off OpenOffice/NeoOffice some time ago — there were certain really basic things it just couldn’t do, in terms of formatting a manuscript professionally. And the undo feature for typing was excruciatingly slow, because each cmd-Z only undid one character of text. There were a ton of other problems, too. Basically it seemed to try really hard to imitate Word (which I don’t like at all) but was imitating the worst parts of it better than the not-so-bad parts of it. And it took all day to launch, and it ate my document once, and on and on .. but I still use it whenever someone sends me a .doc file.
YMMV. These things are very personal. But TextEdit is pretty solid as far as it goes. The stuff it can’t do is really not the stuff that my writing is about. When I need formatting, i import to InDesign.
Daily I mourn WriteNow, an excellent word processor for OS 9 that lives no longer. But I haven’t looked OmniWriter in ages. I’m downloading it now to check out.
(On the other hand, I was thinking about doing my next book in LaTex.)
And yes, to the other question.
TextEdit is really basic and uncluttered and doesn’t crash. Great fonts, too. The one thing I missed was a word-count feature, so I downloaded NanoCount (free).
Neal Stephenson writes in LaTex.
At least, sometimes.
No, Scrivener is a totally different experience — it’s for working on big projects — and you can’t really “use” .doc files with it, although I believe you can “import” them (and of course you can export to .doc or .rtf or whatever). I’m using Scrivener for a short story collection and a novel and I can say, especially re the collection, that Word and Word-like apps don’t hold a candle to it. Know that you can’t really do any special formatting with Scrivener, just good old fashioned “writing.”
I use Pages for everyday type stuff because I’ve never once seen it crash.
I’ve heard Scrivner is the shit, but I don’t use it. I HATE writing in Word. For some reason, I write in Quark or InDesign because that’s what I use when I design, as an art director. Something about the screen, the desktop, just appeals to my eyes. Not sure why. I guess, also, because I can edit fonts, headlines, add art if need be (for designing magazines and journals) and export it as a PDF or Word .doc, too.
I like Open Office. It can handle .doc files (and a bunch of others), and it lets you do spreadsheets and shit too. It’s great.
I use Bean. It’s free, and employs a comforting steaming-cup-of-coffee-sitting-on-manuscript-paper icon. It’s a basic word processing program that still does a surprising number of things, and is a little more pleasing to the eye than Simple Text. It doesn’t do footnotes, however, which means you have to make them manually, but that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.
Also, yes, you can save documents in Word format. You can also save them as PDFs.
http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol
I have the same experience with WriteRoom, I think. I like using it to begin projects, to just sit and write in a completely focused, no distractions way, but then I always go back to word to edit.
I never really used to get what folks had against Word. I mean, seemed to me like a word processor was a word processor.
A few days ago, though, I had to reformat a large document from the regular 8 1/2 X 11 to a 6 X 9 pdf.
I’m sure if you are way Word savvy, this is an easy thing to do. Maybe. Dunno. Damned if I didn’t fuck around for an hour trying to figure it out.
Then I read someone suggesting one do so with Open Office. Downloaded it, imported the Word file, and reformatted the thing in about 8 seconds.
I’m going to start working with Open Office for a little while and see how I like it, keeping an eye on the issues Mykle had.
Open Office is, in my eyes, the only realistic option. It works more or less like MS Word, and does a good job of showing me how the page will look, which is something I can’t do without. It handles Word docs and all the other wacky formats, can make pdfs, etc. It’s pretty fast on Windows, a little more sluggish on Macs.
My software affects me tremendously. I simply can’t write in the wrong program, though I do use gmail to compose a few things, and I’ve wondered about Googledocs.
LaTex is really more for the formatting than the writing. It’s a unix thing, nobody would understand. I’m not sure if anybody uses it any more outside of IEEE paper submissions — or if they ever did.
But it is nice to say “okay, no spaces around em dashes, use smart quotes, indent paragraphs half an inch,” etc. etc. … just to decide on your standard for book layout, and then to never manually go in and hand-apply those standards again, but just say “document! use the standard!” (and then, of course, to say “document! do the same thing but output EPUB! and Kindle! and braille!”)
that’s what LaTex is for. but it’s a language, not an editor. really, writers shouldn’t have to learn such things, but these are dark times.
the last time i used LaTeX it was 1994. right on.
http://gottcode.org/focuswriter
This is amazing, and free/donation at the moment. Don’t sleep.
NeoOffice
don’t use jdarkroom, it’s unstable and i lost a bunch of mediocre writing because of it, twice
My vote remains for OpenOffice, but it is important to note that all the best minds behind that project have recently liberated the best parts of OOo (from Oracle) in order to further the innovative aspects in a more GNU-friendly, less-corporate environment. The new project is called LibreOffice, and though I have not tried it, I will be switching to it (it will be a seamless transition for someone like me, who has natively used OpenDocument (and StarDocument before that) for years now. It will have the best qualities. The major change will be in the way development happens. This will mark the third major split of the original StarOffice Suite, and I feel that is important because there were years at the beginning of the decade when most people predicted that the whole thing would go belly-up.
So, yeah, I use OpenOffice for now, but I’m switching to LibreOffice on its first stable release.
http://www.documentfoundation.org/download to get hold of LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org, of course, to get the dinosaur.
You might like the opensource http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
Although it’s ceased development, it is still a pretty advanced text editor which has a built-in word-count and all kinds of other fancy features. I use it for all my coding work, which of course isn’t so much these days.
Oh right. Forgot that one. Never saw it as very beneficial once 3.0 of OOo made it to the Macworld. But that makes me wrong: there are four major forks of the original StarOffice code now.
It does look amazing!
Hey, but no worries about them ever being able to charge for it: that’s the beauty of OSS, man! Once it’s released under the GNU (or similar) License (which is a legally binding agreement), it’s stuck in the dirty public domain. They can sell services with it, and can (and should) of course ask for donations, but nope, no pay-per-update bullshit like you get with Microsoft and the other thieving sons of whores.
http://trickwithaknife.com/?p=1016
Google Docs.
dark room: http://they.misled.us/dark-room
i’m telling you don’t use that shit it crashes sometimes and even though i was saving like always do i lost a bunch of crap although in the long run i think i was glad that it was out of my life, maybe if you save to word all the time but then what is the point, i wouldn’t trust that thing any further than i could throw it, i have small arms and it is incorporeal
i use it on a PC, though i’ve no idea how reliable the mac version is. but it works great for me – opens super quick, never crashes, saves fine, customizable, etc. i’d definitely consider it more of a ‘power user’ app than most other minimalist text programs. only thing i don’t like about it: no italicize, bold, underline or strike-through text options; though i consider this to be a good thing, forces me to be conservative and when i really want to italicize something, i put html tags around the words instead and clean it up later in a later draft.
caveat: i use dark room for 1st draft stuff; MSWord is still my go-to for final drafts.
also, @reynard, i just saw this on a ‘jdarkroom’ site: “The development of JDarkRoom was heavily inspired by DarkRoom, an implementation of WriteRoom (which is a Mac-only application) for Windows, but DarkRoom requires the Microsoft .NET framework.”
we’re talking about different programs. i’m referring to “DarkRoom” not “JDarkRoom.”
If they could just make it not seem like I’m typing on a scroll, I’d probably be with you there. I like the page-breaking of word processors. I think it’s good.
Privacy issues. I fear that Google will steal my novel and sell it as a set of personalized search results.
You know, I looked at OmniWrite and it’s cute. It removes distraction, giving you a blank page and silence — eventually it does, after you turn off new-age shopping music and Iceland — and i can totally see the power of that. Writeroom I also tried once, and it was the same idea: silence the annoying UI, hide the delicious web browser. No visual distractions! And with Selfcontrol and Freedom I see I can cut off that habit-forming internet access and constant e-mail chatter, too! Productivity at last!
Then I look at my typewriter, and I just laugh.
typewriters aren’t exactly easy to take traveling.
Scrivner is excellent. Google Docs works perfectly as long as you make regular backups.
gDocs is great… if you’re in the US. outside, it’s not exactly smooth sailing. especially if you’re in censored-web countries. access can be spotty at best. i’ve lost one too many drafts to put any eggs in that basket anymore.
i tried using LaTex for a while. it was smarter than me. this was not in 1994. this was in 2008. i am late.
scrivener isn’t open source.
Bean: http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html -open source, loads incredibly fast. It’s a very basic, lean program but it handles most stuff.
sure they are.
i travel with a Hermes Rocket. weighs less than some laptops. does not require an international power adapter. does not need to be shut off during takeoff and landing. accepts A4 paper.
http://mytypewriter.com/hermesbabyrocketof1960s.aspx
I like Smultron for saving code.
I used to have cool software that let you test code offline. Well… I still have it, but it won’t run on Leopard.
What’s a typewriter?
I’ve always used OpenOffice, myself . . . I’ve tried a few others, but none of the ones mentioned here; I’ll try a few of those (thanks, all).
Of course, there is that annoying feature where it special-formats your paragraph whenever you type in a number + period at the start of a paragraph . . . so you have to go through an annoying process of typing and backspacing to get rid of the formatting.
I’ve tried a couple of those fancier ones — Scrivener looks like that sort of thing — with all kinds of windows and special organizing tools and so on and so forth… too damn busy… I mean, whenever I’m actually in a mood where I can tolerate writing without emotional pain, so I can actually manage to write: I just want to write, I don’t need all this stuff that allows me to isolate chapters and arrange outlines and plots and all that redundant, distracting nonsense that only makes me sick to my stomach and not want to write any longer.
DarkRoom/WriteRoom looks too simplistic, like TextEdit designed to give you eye-strain. But I’ll look at it, anyhow, just because I can… .