software for writing books

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

I see your point, but Scrivener is not nearly so complex as your examples. It is after all, a much, much smaller install. That said, LSB is regarded as having a steep learning curve and yet I was able to quickly learn how to drive it. WriteWayPro was even easier.

I don't think that LSB has a "steep learning curve;" I think that the concepts behind it are badly documented, and the things that people expect to be there from the marketing spiel aren't. The developer, I think, in looking at it in hindsight, thought he'd do everything in databases, and allow each writer to "roll his own," so if using a builder suited one person, they'd use that. A planner, another; the outline, a third, and so forth.

He essentially put named elements (like chapters in rtf format) in a database, and then allowed the authors to "call them" into the various devices/tools (planners, builders, sequences, storyboards and the like) simply to facilitate the ability to LOOK at the same data, presented in a different way. You could, say, write chapters in a Planner, or scenes (whatever floats your boat) and then pull them into the Outline, and then drag and drop them about to your heart's content. That part, I thought, was somewhat useful. Of course, you can do exactly the same thing in XYwriter. {shrug}. And...I just like whats-is-name, at XY, more. (For whatever that is worth).

He (the LSB developer) also originally started from a screenwriter's perspective, as he himself has stated, which affected how he viewed the usability. It has some features I quite liked (the random character generator) and some that I thought were useless. (The storyboards, given their quite-limited functionality.) I felt as though the developer spent more time developing the "backgrounds" (to make LSB look pretty) than he did the functionality. Still don't understand the value of "sequences" over "storyboards," and I still prefer XYWriter's time-lining (done for you, not BY you) over LSB's, which is all manual labor. But, as we previously courteously agreed, to each their own.

And I think it's also quite clear that one needs to be happy with LSB as it is; I don't think an update has been forthcoming in what, 4 years now?

If there is a clear need for books on how to drive a simple piece of software such as Scrivener then the UI is getting in the way of productivity.

Well, there are books and easy-peasy online, interactive tutorials, on how to use Word, which has been around for decades, and apparently, based on the files from my clientele, nobody reads/uses them. ;-) Certainly, I find a rather huge percentage of the population has zero idea about a huge amount of Word's built-in functionality, simply because they are apparently allergic or adverse to tutorials, manuals, etc. I don't know if that says something about the software, or the people using it. I'm never happy with any piece of software until I have, and have read, front-to-back, the manual. But, {shrug}, that's just me. I wouldn't have the business today that I have, had I not ever bothered to learn Word--wouldn't have had the fundamentals, and the understanding of how it works well enough so that I could map it to making ebooks properly and correctly via export to HTML.

Again, FWIW. I don't think that there's really any software out there worth two hoots that's entirely intuitive. A nice goal for developers, but...I can't think of any such examples off the top of my head.

Hitch

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

I see your point, but Scrivener is not nearly so complex as your examples. It is after all, a much, much smaller install. That said, LSB is regarded as having a steep learning curve and yet I was able to quickly learn how to drive it. WriteWayPro was even easier.

If there is a clear need for books on how to drive a simple piece of software such as Scrivener then the UI is getting in the way of productivity.



No, the item in the Options menu is "Save after period of inactivity" or similar, and it can be set to other limits. If it did a save every 2 seconds, then I'd see this as being rather excessive and would constantly worry about undo and also interruptions to my workflow and I haven't noticed any as yet. And I haven't found a conventional autosave in the Options menu, but that doesn't mean its not somewhere else.

file> save or file> save as, and if you go to turn the program off it saves a backup before the program finishes closing down.

[Metal Mick]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I don't think that LSB has a "steep learning curve;"

Many do, so I'll go with the majority opinion this time. I found it idiosyncratic but not intractable.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Certainly, I find a rather huge percentage of the population has zero idea about a huge amount of Word's built-in functionality, simply because they are apparently allergic or adverse to tutorials, manuals, etc.

Agreed... and now you're bringing back some pretty bad memories when typists where I used to work were suddenly termed Word-Processor Operators. To them a WP was a glorified typewriter. And for many people, it still is.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Again, FWIW. I don't think that there's really any software out there worth two hoots that's entirely intuitive. A nice goal for developers, but...I can't think of any such examples off the top of my head.

Hitch

That doesn't mean there aren't pieces of software that have their UI sorted so that the manual needn't be constantly referenced for even the most elementary of tasks. I tried to sort out how to insert special characters and found a search of the Scrivener manual had nearly 50 uses of the word "special" none of which was relevant. And on the topic of UI, I think it's beyond time that the current menu bar at the top of an application was pretty much given the flick but that's a topic for another thread.

[Metal Mick]

Originally Posted by crich70

file> save or file> save as, and if you go to turn the program off it saves a backup before the program finishes closing down.

Again thanks, and I know I can do this. But my earlier comment was that there is no "save" button for the toolbar, not that it was missing from the menu. Perhaps it's an Apple thing.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

Again thanks, and I know I can do this. But my earlier comment was that there is no "save" button for the toolbar, not that it was missing from the menu. Perhaps it's an Apple thing.

Ah ok. Sorry I misunderstood you.

[Metal Mick]

Originally Posted by crich70

Ah ok. Sorry I misunderstood you.

Though so. Wasn't peeved with you at all, just wanted to explain.

[Metal Mick]

And while I'm here, the Kindle version of Hewson's book on Scrivener is USD$5.65 so it won't break the bank if I buy it.

According to Amazon, Hewson wrote The Killing (and other stories) - set in Denmark (I think), and made into a fine series for Danish TV. So he isn't a nobody, and I think the Scrivener book will be well-written, although in the second paragraph of Hewson's forward, he's missing a word.

My suggestion is that for anyone considering Scrivener, they download the trial version and follow the tutorial, read what's on Amazon, and give it a good try, starting from scratch in the program, but with a partly-completed novel so you know where you're going and what you want to do. And particularly for Windows users, look at WriteWayPro. Then decide.

Perhaps part of the issue for me is that I'm in MS Windows and Scrivener is originally from Apple, complete with Apple-isms (for example "Show Invisibles" under format menu for revealing non-printing characters normally seen under the View menu in LibreOffice). This indicates that the move from Apple to MS has been done in a superficial way at best.

[Lemurion]

I cheated, I waited to use Scrivener until I got a Mac - it's on my old Mac Mini. I use yWriter and Word on Windows.

[sgtrock]

I read through this entire thread with a great deal of interest. One of the most fascinating aspects for me was to see how people's perceptions of the available tools changed over the lifetime of the thread.

I'm just getting back into writing after far longer than I care to think about. Things have changed enormously since the last time that I looked at the available tools, so I'm slowly feeling my way toward a complete toolchain.

I also prefer to use cross platform tools whenever and wherever possible. In my experience they tend to be far more robust than platform specific tools. I think it has something to do with the need to decouple functionality from basic platform code when developing software.

In addition to that, I worked in the IT department of a typesetting and publishing house for several years. The attitude that presentation must be separate from information in order to be able to publish in a wide variety of electronic and paper formats became deeply embedded in my thinking while I was there.

My background in IT has also made me a huge fan of the belt and suspenders approach to data backup and version control. I've received one too many panicked calls from someone who just deleted several weeks or months worth of work with a single thoughtless click. I don't want to ever put myself in a similar situation.

Finally, I'm cheap and I like robust, stable solutions. I'll pay for software if I have to. However, I would far rather use FLOSS software when I can. All of the software applications listed below are free for the download.

So with that background in mind, here is what I'm currently using and why.

First, backup. I'm currently using SpiderOak for backup to the cloud. It's available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. I really like their design philosophy. I REALLY like the fact that their security model is deliberately designed to prevent anyone, including themselves, from seeing anything stored on their servers because encryption happens at the client before uploading. SpiderOak has a free trial service available limited to 2GB and a "plus plan" at $10/mo or $100/yr for 100 GB. I'm currently using about 10 GB for my writing and a lot of other stuff that I want backed up.

Second, version control. After mucking about with manually moving versions from one folder to another for a few years, I finally broke down and tried subversion. It's pretty decent but it's also a bit heavyweight. The major problem that I ran into with Subversion was that it didn't handle branching as cleanly as I'd like. I work fulltime at my day job so I tend to write in much shorter bursts when I have a few minutes and for an hour or so in the evening. I wanted a solution that would let me write on three devices and keep things up to date between them; my Linux desktop, my Google Nexus phone, and a tablet running Android. I decided that my best approach was to maintain three branches and keep them synced. This is doable in subversion but it's not a trivial task.

After digging through a variety of reviews and comparisons I settled on git. Git is based on a peer to peer model instead of a centralized server/client model like subversion. (Although you can run git in a client/server model if you need to.) It therefore makes branching and merging trivially easy.

Again, there are git clients available on all five of the platforms that I mentioned above. Right now I'm using the packaged version for my Linux distro (Debian testing if anyone cares) and SGit on my two Android devices.

Next comes note taking, character management, etc. I've been a fan of mind mapping in general and Freemind in particular for many years so that's what I started with. For the past couple of years, though, I was becoming dissatisfied with the relative lack of progress with it. I discovered a fork of Freemind called Freeplane some time last year. This page highlights the differences between the Freemind and Freeplane.

So far, I've been very satisfied with Freeplane. I find that its editing features are definitely better than Freemind. There's a plug-in for it called GTD (Getting Things Done) that's handy for keeping track of tasks. Also, its docear integration looks like it might be worthwhile if I ever get around to writing something that requires a lot of research.

So, now that the basic infrastructure has been defined, what about the actual writing and publishing? Back when I was working for the typesetting/publishing company, I became aware of TeX and LaTeX. This combination produces some of the most beautiful printed output that I've ever seen. The best GUI that I've ever used for generating documents based upon TeX/LaTeX is LyX**. The WYSIWYMean model lets you concentrate on the actual writing without worrying about the distractions that can inevitably creep in with WYSIWYG applications like LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. For years I did almost all of my writing in LyX and used its excellent import/export features to share documents with others.

Unfortunately, while LyX is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, there is no iOS or Android version available at this time. This obviously leaves me in a bit of a pickle if I want to continue to write the way that I plan to.

After thinking about it for a while I realized that my best bet was to fall back to writing straight text. Text editors are readily available on all of my target platforms, for one. For another, this will force me to completely decouple the writing process from the presentation and publication processes. Right now, I'm using Kwrite on my Linux desktop and Vi Improved Touch on my two Android devices. I have used vim for basic editing tasks on *nix based OSes for over a decade and I'm pretty comfortable with it.

The final step in my toolchain is going to be conversion from text to publication ready format. I plan to import the text files (one per chapter) into LyX for most of the massaging (plus inclusion of any illustrations, etc.) because I want to take advantage of its broad array of export utilities. Once that's done I need to figure out whether I want to go directly to epub (probably Sigil for final massaging unless I find something else), plan to submit to Smashwords (.DOC, ewww! ), or take another route entirely.

I'm not too worried. With straight text as my base format, I'll be able to choose multiple directions if I wish.

So, to the experts out there... any thoughts on where and how I could improve my workflow? Any recommendations about tools for publishing?

TIA

**BTW, I STRONGLY urge all aspiring authors and amateur/semi-pro typsetters to read A Few Notes on Book Design by Peter Wilson. He does a great job of explaining in layman's terms how and why typographic conventions for paper publishing came into being. I think it's a great resource even if your only target is ebook publishing.

The companion book, The Memoir Class manual for LyX, is an outstanding example in and of itself of the kind of truly beautiful presentation that LyX is capable of. The manual has dozens of illustrations highlighting how LyX leverages LaTeX to accomplish what it does. Well worth flipping through even if you have no intention of ever using LyX.

[Metal Mick]

Originally Posted by sgtrock

<snip>

**BTW, I STRONGLY urge all aspiring authors and amateur/semi-pro typsetters to read [URL="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/memdesign/memdesign.pdf"]<snip>.

Many thanks for your detailed thoughts and also the link to the typesetting reference and also Freeplane. Much appreciated.

I may not use FP, but it's nice to know of it - it may yet prove a useful tool.

[jandrew]

Originally Posted by sgtrock

I'm not too worried. With straight text as my base format, I'll be able to choose multiple directions if I wish.

So, to the experts out there... any thoughts on where and how I could improve my workflow? Any recommendations about tools for publishing?

As you investigate your plain text workflow, consider looking into markdown and pandoc:

http://box.matto.nl/markdown.html
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

There are a couple android editors that have some markdown support JotterPad X (markdown), LightPaper Pro (multimarkdown). Or, if you are comfortable writing LaTeX code without LyX, pandoc supports that as both input and output formats.

cheers,
andrew

[sgtrock]

Originally Posted by jandrew

As you investigate your plain text workflow, consider looking into markdown and pandoc:

http://box.matto.nl/markdown.html
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

There are a couple android editors that have some markdown support JotterPad X (markdown), LightPaper Pro (multimarkdown). Or, if you are comfortable writing LaTeX code without LyX, pandoc supports that as both input and output formats.

cheers,
andrew

Thank you for the suggestion.

I've looked at various markup languages in the past. That typesetting company that I worked for used a couple of different systems, for example. One was proprietary that drove both their proof ready printers and their final print ready cameras. The other was SGML. I dabbled a bit in the latter. I've also messed around a fair amount with HTML, man page editing, and even a bit of LaTeX.

The problem that I kept running into over and over was that having to think about adding the markup in a document took me away from concentrating on the writing itself. I'm also a fairly slow typist (30-40 wpm) and still manage to make a fair number of errors unless I concentrate on key positioning. That tends to slow me down even more when adding markup.

For those reasions, I decided that I needed a decent GUI if I were to include presentation instructions in a document. I eventually ended up with LyX after trying MS Office, OpenOffice, an old KDE specific editor whose name escapes me now, and a couple of others. LyX was simply better at just getting out of the way and letting me concentrate on writing than any of the WYSIWYG editors.

I took a quick look at both markdown and pandoc as I went through this thread. I don't think that either one will really solve my core issues with including markup in my text. I would far rather just write, then figure out how to assign styles to the text after the fact.

(shrug) My way of tackling it after the fact will certainly add some additional work. OTOH, I do find it easier to focus on the actual content writing my way. Hopefully, that will help offset the loss in productivity when it comes time to begin the massaging for publication.

-- edit--
Come to think of it, I suppose that I could use sed or something similar to assign one or more default paragraph formats as part of a batch job process. That would help speed up the process enormously. And if I used markdown or pandoc, can I use either one as an import to LyX? Hmmm... I think I've got some research to do.

[sgtrock]

Originally Posted by Metal Mick

Many thanks for your detailed thoughts and also the link to the typesetting reference and also Freeplane. Much appreciated.

I may not use FP, but it's nice to know of it - it may yet prove a useful tool.

You're welcome. I know my workflow isn't necessarily the best around, but I do like to think I've found a pretty useful set of tools that may help fill some corner cases for others.

[jandrew]

Originally Posted by sgtrock

(shrug) My way of tackling it after the fact will certainly add some additional work. OTOH, I do find it easier to focus on the actual content writing my way. Hopefully, that will help offset the loss in productivity when it comes time to begin the massaging for publication.

-- edit--
Come to think of it, I suppose that I could use sed or something similar to assign one or more default paragraph formats as part of a batch job process. That would help speed up the process enormously. And if I used markdown or pandoc, can I use either one as an import to LyX? Hmmm... I think I've got some research to do.

# Use What Works For You

Everyone should do what works best for *them* to get the job done. But remember, markup and pandoc can be useful to you whether you use them early or late in your process. When you import into LyX and add styles, that is adding LaTeX markup (in a wysiwig manner). Then you can still use pandoc to convert from the LaTeX files to other forms: pdf, html, epub, etc.

The key to using it as you write is to use only the **absolute minimum** to define the structure/semantics you need (not presentation). For example, this reply is written in markdown and includes:

* a level one heading
* paragraphs
* emphasis and strong emphasis
* a simple list (this one)

So most of writing in markdown is both simple and unobtrusive. I find that when people first look at markdown/multimarkdown the syntax examples look overly complex because they are trying to show as much as possible in a small example. In reality, it is more like that old Palmolive dish soap commercial: you're already soaking in it

And yes, you can take valid markdown (like the text of this reply) and run it through pandoc to create a LaTeX version to open with LyX, or run it through pandoc to create an epub version to open with Sigil for further massaging.

cheers,
andrew

[sgtrock]

After digging into markdown, multimarkdown, and pandoc today I've decided I was way too hasty to assume that I couldn't use it. Markdown for simple fiction is dead easy to use. I was able to use pandoc to turn my existing text file into pretty good looking xhtml, pdf, and EPUB with no alterations whatsoever to the file. Clearly, this is a lot closer to writing the way that I want than any other markup language that I've used in the past!

to everyone who suggested that I look into this!