Poll for Ebook Writers - Your Favorite Word Processor?

[JulieMack]

Originally Posted by James_Wilde

The poll question was what's your favourite word-processor, so I answered Open Office.

But for writing I use Scrivener. When I'm done there, I export it to OOo for final word-processing before sending it away to Smashwords. Of course, I have to save it as a MS Word doc since you don't handle OOo yet.

Wow - that seems like a lot of work! LOL What is OOo? Is that Open Office? Could you use Open Office and then send it to Smashwords? The reason I ask is I have hyperlinks and regular MS Word does not transfer hyperlinks when converting to PDF. But, OO does? Why Scrivener?

[James_Wilde]

Originally Posted by JulieMack

Wow - that seems like a lot of work! LOL What is OOo? Is that Open Office? Could you use Open Office and then send it to Smashwords? The reason I ask is I have hyperlinks and regular MS Word does not transfer hyperlinks when converting to PDF. But, OO does? Why Scrivener?

Hi Julie:

Not a lot of work, actually. I do all the hard work in Scrivener (see below), then, when it gets to what I call preproduction, I export it and take it into OOo for the last tarting up.

OOo is the standard abbreviation for Open Office on their site. It stands for openoffice.org, since another company has a prior claim to the name Open Office.

No, you can't - yet - send your book in OOo format to Smashwords. They only take documents in MS Word format, but you can save it in that format from OOo, which I did. However I hope, like many others, that this poll is going to change that. After all, Word has only 50% of this poll, and OOo has 25%, which is half of Word's popularity.

OOo exports with hyperlinks to pdf. I just tested. However, you don't send a pdf to Smashwords. You send a document in doc format. But when you produce a paper book, say via Amazon's CreateSpace, you will probably produce a pdf.

Scrivener, formerly a Mac-only app, now in late beta for Windows too, is a marvellous tool for the creative part of writing. If you are familiar with Master Documents in OOo (Word probably has something similar) you will know that you can link any number of subdocuments to a Master Document, and they will be incorporated into the text in that order, and you can change the order fairly simply. A subdocument can be anything from several chapters to a few sentences. Well, imagine that being a hundred times easier, and with as many of your research documents as you need all easily accessible and re-orderable in one window, and you'll have some idea what Scrivener is all about. I believe they have a trial version that you can play with for a month or so. The address is http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivenerforwindows/ assuming you don't have a Mac, otherwise just use the top-level address. I heartily recommend it, and I installed the Windows beta on my wife's PC recently.

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by JulieMack

The reason I ask is I have hyperlinks and regular MS Word does not transfer hyperlinks when converting to PDF. But, OO does? Why Scrivener?

Julie, I created a PDF version of our book from MS Word 2007 (sized for smaller e-reading devices without the need to zoom in). The hyperlinks in the PDF work just fine when viewed using Adobe Reader. The Kindle does not support PDF hyperlinks. They do work properly on the Kindle in the MOBI version.

[JulieMack]

@James - Hmmm I have to rethink this...lol .doc files seem to cause conversion problems for some reason - I am seeing this with Calibre... OOo seems less problemtaic (not sure why)

I do have a Mac I have heard of Scrivener, I just have not used it. I will revisit it though. Thanks for the info!!!

@Dreamwriter - it must be a Mac thing. OOo seems to be the best option for maintaining hyperlinks. However, are there mobile readers that accept hyperlinks?

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by JulieMack

However, are there mobile readers that accept hyperlinks?

I only have experience using a Kindle myself, so I'm not sure if other e-reading devices do support hyperlinks in PDF files. Perhaps someone else here can let us know.