10-03-2012, 05:22 AM | #256 | |||
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As you said you'd done it, I'd like to know, because I've tried numerous ways; they all require me to manually re-enter the individual chapter titles into the Storyboard, then associate the chapters in Chapter mode, and then, when I export the re-ordered "chapters" to a builder, all I get are the chapter titles-not the related chapter TEXT. I've tried this at least 10 different ways, and I do not see any way to take existing, typed chapters from a builder (nor planner) to a Storyboard, move them around for a while and then send the resorted chapters, in sequence, back to a builder/planner with the relevant chapters still attached to the chapter TITLES. So--what did you do, please? As I also said--I did actually ask the developer, back in about Spring of 2010, and he did, at that time, say it "didn't work that way." I admit, I then thought it was a pretty silly feature, because the same thing can be done with ease in Word, and move all the chapter TEXT, too, without all the retyping, cutting-and-pasting, etc., with one click, drag and drop If you have an automated way in LSB that means the chapter titles DO export in toto and in sequence to the Storyboard, swap them all about, and then automatically export them all (with content) back IN, I would genuinely be desirous of learning it. Quote:
I also actually started out--believe it or not--with ye olden OS/6--not Word; IBM standalone word processing machines, one step up from the IBM Selectric II. Before the advent of the desktop computer. I started with WordStar and then with Lotus' then-product WordPerfect. I loathed Word for years, thinking it was Satan-spawn, until I kicked myself in the ass and spent a whopping two hours learning the more advanced and less-known features. I don't say lightly that once learned, Word is actually a fairly fabulous program. I know, I know--I'd never have thought I'd have heard the words come out of my mouth--but it's true. When I compare what I just tried to describe, (vis-a-vis the storyboards), to using Word's outlining/document map functioning, where I can just grab a chapter title and move the whole section, with the concomitant text, in 1 second...well, yes, it's hard for me to see the advantage. If people work better with storyboards, then, yes, I can see the purpose. But not if what I've described is accurate--manually type the chapter titles to get the chapters themselves to match up with their related chapter heads in Storyboard, then move things around, and then export it as a Builder...to only get the same Chapter heads? So you have to C&P the chapters BACK into the Builder? Then I'd say it's not great. I also found the "styles" in the exported RTF kind of a giant pain to deal with. I was surprised--and, no, I don't remember all the details now--of how MUCH clean-up I had to do in Word to get the RTF--which should import beautifully--to work properly. I was pretty irritated by that, as well. I wasn't even USING Styles in LSB--this was just garbage-y codes that got exported for no discernible reason. Again--we work with Styles in RTF and Word and CSS in HTML all day long, so this isn't alien territory to me; I was pretty perturbed at how much clean-up it took for a simple text-only document to be cut-and-pasted into Word and cleaned of oddball style issues. I liked the Outline function. I don't think it's anything particularly wonderful; but it's workable. (I'd like it better if, again, one didn't have to then create all the relevant chapters by typing their headings by hand a second time so they could be manually associated with the Outline headers--why not just an export function that lets you create X number of pre-named Chapters? As you can do with a Planner?) As we've agreed, the mindmaps are pretty dismal. I won't speak to keeping Character "Journals." Everybody writes their own way. I don't think I quite get the reasoning for having an "images" function separate from a "gallery" function. I'm sure there is one--I simply don't get it. With regard to the "timeline" function, as I said--it seems to require that the writer create all the entries--you have to manually create a timeline for each chapter of your manuscript (that you've already written), etc. One of the things that I rather liked about YWriter was that it automatically generated the timelines for each character itself--so you could easily see that you'd put "Kate" in two scenes occurring at the same time. As far as I can tell, LSB's timeline does not do that for you; for it to "work," you have to manually type in all the entries. I can see that being pretty tedious if you had 25 characters with interwoven story lines. OTOh, the way that works may have been changed as well, as I'm sure you're going to tell me that the Storyboarding has been changed. I just think that to make it work the way it's advertised to work takes a whole lot of workarounds. To me, that's not efficient. My last line of my last post wasn't intended as snarky, EITHER. I meant it. At this point, I'm afraid to say anything to you that's open to interpretation, so I'll limit it to, goodnight. Hitch |
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10-03-2012, 10:44 AM | #257 |
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As a Moderator, I would just like to make a comment about how courteous these discussions have been concerning some of the 'stickier' points of LSB.
Even though there have been a few ripples of disagreement, as well as certain differenes regarding interpretative stances, both principal parties involved are attempting to be courteous and understanding in their analyses as they work through this discussion. So....BRAVO! Don (Moderator) Last edited by Dr. Drib; 10-03-2012 at 10:46 AM. |
10-03-2012, 09:32 PM | #258 |
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This discussion is fascinating me regarding the software - LSB - which the parties are talking about. Differing points of view are always very helpful to any prospective purchaser.
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10-05-2012, 04:50 AM | #259 | |
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I don't understand why the developer would not make the Chapter reordering (or scene, whatever) in the visual uses (the Storyboards/Sequences) not automatically synch, upon request, with the existing typed chapters. This, to me, is utterly illogical. The point of software is to do automatedly what we used to do by hand. IF I'm correct, and the Storyboard only allows you to re-order the chapter HEADERS and then output them to a new Builder, then I don't see the point. All it does, it seems, is allow one to sit there with a picture that depicts a scene and a chapter title, and move the "scenes" around like Scrabble tiles--and then you can either a) output the reordered chapter TITLES to a new Builder (and then manually Associate those chapter titles/names to the actual, typed chapter, one at a time), or just sit there in the existing Planner or Builder (or Outline) and click the up and Down arrows to reorder the chapters the way you've now re-envisioned them in the Storyboard. I'm sorry, but that seems terminally DUMB to me. How hard would it have been to have a "synch to matching chapter heads" function, so that the author wouldn't have to do all that work? This basically already works in Planners; you type a chapter name, and when you double-click it, if there's a matching chapter, it auto-populates. But NOT in a Builder, which is where you output the re-ordered chapter titles TO. I don't get that. Like I said--and I wish I still had YWriter on my laptop; I had it in there with a 60K word story I abandoned, but not knowing I was going to have this dicussion, I nuked it. In YWriter, as long as you set the timeframes for the scenes, it calculates where the characters are at any given time FOR you. LSB, you have to re-input all that data into the "timeline" function. I actually asked for (and I don't remember why) the contrast function. You can create two lists, and, well, contrast them. I think at the time, I thought it might be useful for "before" and "after," or good v. evil, or something like that, but basically, it's a two-column table, into which you can type text. That's all it is. I can do that in OneNote just as rapidly. I have created a Builder recently, and when I think of bits of this and that, or the opening for a scene, or a story, I type it in a builder item, but honestly, it's mostly to convince myself that I'm using LSB for something. As I have OneNote open all the time (for phone call message to me), I could do that in there, also, probably faster than in LSB, and with greater ease--a notebook with "story ideas," one to a "page," or bits of dialogue or a scene...whatever. As I stated up top, I would truly like to know if there are faster ways this works. I'd like to know what it does that is so fantastic, that some people swear by it. I am the first to say, as I think I have, that if you use a lot of visual aids, I guess it may be very helpful. I do use some photos from time to time, but not as heavily as many people, I'd guess. I am a total software hound--I buy and try software like crazy, always looking for something cool or useful--but LSB kind of burned me on "writing software," because after trying it, and having "heard" that it's "much like Scrivener," which seems to be the "cool kids' toy," I've decided that maybe writing software is just not for me. I find LSB to have a lot of distractions, and create a lot of "time-burning," (like the storyboards, spending a ton of time deciding on a background image and colors for the setup, creating galleries that are supposed to "inspire" you, creating journals for your "characters," etc. etc. etc.), during which I could actually be working. it feels frivolous, to me. Like it spends more time on the frillery and foofery and less on the WORK of writing. Now, lots of other people may ignore all that, or, hell, doing all that may inspire them and get them writing. We all know that writers all work differently. This last part, about time-burning, etc., is simply how it seems to me. It's not a discussion of anyone else's work habits or or suggestion of a lack thereof. I guess what aggravates me is that it does not feel like it takes writing seriously, and the stuff it does easily (like making galleries or creating pretty backgrounds or making pretty storyboards) isn't the stuff that people need to get work DONE, like, the ability to reorder stuff in a storyboard and then output a reordered manuscript. At its heart, and I know I said this all before, it's a DB with some RTF files and some images--that's it. I just don't think it would have been that hard for the developer to go the extra step to add the type of computerized, software-based actual functionality to it to avoid these repetitive steps. I also know that the Yahoo group is decidedly slower than it was when I first started two years ago, which either means that ALL the new users are way smarter than those who came before them, or that there are very few new users. I suspect it's the latter, now that Scrivener has a PC-version, and that's not a good sign for the future, but that's a very loose deduction on my part. So, if I'm wrong about all these functions, I genuinely would like to know it. I'd love to love my software again. Hitch |
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10-18-2012, 11:34 AM | #260 |
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Over the next 8 days, the new Macheist bundle is available for 25$. The reason I'm posting it here, is that it includes Scrivener (45$) and Evernote with 13 months of Premium activation (60$) - So I'm definitely getting it.
Note that this is Mac only, thus no Windows versions! 25% of each purchase also goes to charity... Full list of apps for those interested, with a total value of 539$: - Bejeweled 3 - Scrivener - Courier - PDF Signer - Artboard - Jurassic Park - Sam and Max - Strong Bad - Radium - DiskTools Pro - Evernote (With 15 months of Evernote Premium included) - HDRtist - Firetask* - BioShock 2* - Painter Lite* * means that they will be available to all, when 25.000 bundles have been sold. As of this post, 7000 has been sold. |
10-19-2012, 12:48 PM | #261 |
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Note to anyone doing NaNo: there are a few deals during Nano. Afterwards, there are deals for participants and even better ones for winners. The ones which interested me were Scrivener and WriteWay Pro, each offering a free trial over NaNo and 50% reductions for the winners. There are lots of deals which are Mac only and some other deals that Windows users might be interested in.
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10-20-2012, 02:26 AM | #262 |
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On this note, as a follow-up to my LSB XE posts:
I decided that I was so irked at LSB XE that it was actually putting me off. For what it's worth, I've reinstalled YWriter, and Simon's made some nice changes to it in the 2 years since I'd used it. He's updated it for Win7, and I like what he's done with it. It's a nice, impressive little program, and I cheerfully registered (paid for) my copy, to encourage him to keep working on it. Hitch |
10-21-2012, 02:26 AM | #263 |
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My final words on LSB
Hi all,
I thought it was necessary to put a few final words regarding the issue of LSB here. I've spent a fair while trying to decide just how to phrase things without coming across as promoting this particular software (while still giving useful information to MR members). So, we'll see how I go. What I won't do is make this a tutorial on how to use LSB - that's been done already, plus there is the mailing list on the (admittedly, execrable) Yahoo! site (so be prepared for some of your messages there to go missing). I did take note of the claimed issues regarding rtf output. I've had problems getting it into LibreOffice - it comes in jumbled (like a 10,000 word chapter overtyped onto four or five lines) which irks me, but ctrl-A and then selecting say, a Body Text style sorts things out. Still, it shouldn't happen. I don't have Word, but in WordPad, any file or generated manuscript comes in fine without any apparent spurious characters. At least on my machine. Regarding word processors, I'd probably still be using Lotus' WordPro (not WordPerfect as has been erroneously reported) for my writing because some of its features are still unparalleled today as far as I know, like being able to create tabbed sub-documents with unique style sheets, and being able to reorder them easily by dragging; as far as I'm concerned, its handling of bullets and numbers is still far more logical than anything in LibreOffice, nor from what I've seen, Word. When I spat the dummy with MyNovel (earlier in this thread), I tried yWriter (again, and for at least the fifth time) because several people here gave it a good rap, but I just found I didn't like the way it worked, and for a while I even thought it was pretty limited in what it could do, because of the way it worked. There was just a severe incompatibility with the way its creator provided tools for me to use, and where I was expecting to find them. Still, I've downloaded it again, and will look into it again when I have time and I'll see how it works out for me, when I start on my next novel. On that topic, I looked long and hard at WriteItNow because the reviews I read about it were quite glowing. I passed on it. Its character dossiers irritated my colon beyond all measure, for it obliged or encouraged me to assign a numeric value to a character trait like honesty. Okay... but what exactly would it mean to me as a writer, if I had one character at say 85% honesty and another at 75% or 84%? Simply, I had never, ever thought in those terms and doubt there is sufficient youthfulness ahead of me to start doing so now. Oh, and its word-processing tools were at best, rudimentary, which again, irked me. Thank goodness for demos! Currently, I'm nearing the 100k word mark in the first draft of my novel, and though I'm doing it all in LSB, I can't claim proficiency yet, though the tools I do use seem to work very well. Setting different "modes" for say a planner, or dossier, is still incomprehensible to me and the help files are unilluminating, but when I have time I'll ask at the mailing list for a more detailed explanation. I can create a planner (say Chapter List), and set it to Dossier mode, Chapter mode, Planner mode, and about a half-dozen more. I don't know what the differences are, but eventually I'll find out. A shortcoming I haven't mentioned before is that I can only have 3 chapters open at once, and this seems to be a function of the software used to create the program. I don't like it, though and the limitation applies to all file types. I tried Scrivener, and tend to refute claims that it and LSB are similar. Unless I've missed them, there aren't any wordprocessing tools in Scrivener and things in LSB are absent from Scrivener and vice versa. To me, it makes no difference if I'm the sole person on MobileRead who likes LSB - it works for me, and after finding a predominantly green UI colour scheme in the first day or so, I haven't visited that part of the program since. Green, I am told is easier on the eyes, so that's what I went with. Adding around 75k words since mid-July tends to indicate the program doesn't provide a handicap to my creativity. If LSB is prompting me to play with colors needlessly, then I'm either ignoring it or the signs are so subtle that I can't detect them. I have only dabbled with the storyboard and other visual aspects of LSB because I tend not to work that way. Besides, although the website shows how they are used, I lack the time and energy to hunt down pictures I can use, let alone create them. Rather, I have a vivid imagination, a love of the language, and a determination to put the scenes I imagine into words that are uniquely mine, and then onto a page. I have no clear idea what a "visual" person is, but if my previous sentence indicates a working definition, then I'd run with that. Two things I'd love in LSB: spell-as-you-go, and also being able to store links to web pages easily. Little things, but I miss them badly. MyNovel had both. An unexpected tool is the thesaurus: highlight a word in a sentence and the thesaurus gives a string of alternatives, each within the highlighted word in the sentence, so you can read an alternative and decide if the fit is okay. I wish you all the best with your endeavors, but as I said, my novel is getting near its end (at least as far as first draft is concerned) and I shall soon start on the second draft. I doubt I will have an excess of time to return here too often, but I'll try. In the meantime, I'd encourage everyone interested in such software to try the demos for fit and functionality, and if at the end you find you prefer four or more applications over one, go with that - I've been there and done that too. If your choice makes you productive, how can that be wrong? And if you happen to prefer an attractive workspace, don't let anyone brand you a dilettante, nor allow yourself to be bullied by those who rail against your choice just because they prefer something else. Regards to all. Last edited by Metal Mick; 10-21-2012 at 06:16 PM. Reason: Second thoughts on phrasing. |
03-27-2014, 07:16 PM | #264 |
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Update 2014
Hi all,
I thought I'd resurrect this thread by providing an update on what I've learnt so far. 1. LSB has proven to be pretty good, but is now underdeveloped and has some annoyances, not the least of which is the lack of text zoom. If you have a low-res screen or young eyes you might well be okay though. It provides no handicap to writing and has an active user group on Yahoo! My novel has topped-out at around 175k and I was able to learn about LSB, the characters, my locations, and many other details as I went. Though it has a lot to offer, it lacks good export (to ePub, for example) features and handy little tools like setting a dedication page. Its timeline and other features are rudimentary and a consequence of the programming language it was written in. An update is unlikely. 2. Because I bought a licence for Scrivener, for the final edit, I exported my novel to that. It is a completely different working environment and will take a lot for me to learn, if I persist with it. The ruler, for example is hidden away under Formatting, rather than in the more common View menu. There are many, many idiosyncratic features to this software, so new users should be prepared for frustrations. One thing I find hard to cope with is the menu item that opens a (dictionary/thesaurus) site in the default browser: in LSB the equivalent worked fine with multiple desktops, but in Scrivener, the window opens in the first desktop which is annoying if you're not working in that one. Scrivener has an active user forum but woe betide anyone who criticizes Scrivener - I added my support for someone who found fault with the UI and was quickly told I didn't even have the right to air my views! The OP was similarly dealt with. The forum I think, is poorly moderated and dominated by some who have fairly strong opinions. I'm tempted to use the word "rabid", but won't just for now. That said, any question you might have has probably already been answered so you can find answers without even joining the forum. 3. Because I have fond memories of how easy it was to get going in WriteWay Pro, I'm likely to use it for my next novel. It costs little and is feature-rich. The worst that can happen is that I return to either LSB or Scrivener. Perhaps there's an Apple vs Windows thing going on in the UI, and how they work, but I tend to think Scrivener has evolved with time with new features added and placed where the creators thought it fitted and not thought about further. 4. None of these pieces of software will make you a better writer, but can ease the productivity somewhat. Being able to collect and keep all your thoughts and research in one place is what they excel at. With a word processor alone, I think I'd struggle to keep track of everything I've been up to. Writing a novel is a complex, extensive task and a conscientious writer will need to keep track of many aspects of the document that specialist tools will facilitate. Good luck with your writing. Any further questions, please ask. |
03-27-2014, 08:36 PM | #265 | |
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I was always willing to pay for OneNote, but now that it's free and available on a much wider basis, it's that much cooler of a tool. |
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03-27-2014, 09:41 PM | #266 | |
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1. Understanding the basics 2. Work in Progress 3. Revision 4. Collaboration and other platforms 5. Compile And each section is broken down further into smaller sections that discuss a feature. |
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03-28-2014, 02:39 AM | #267 | |
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I tend to think though that Scrivener's UI is in need of a good review - that there are so many books for a piece of software that is basically a cut-down WP with a few nice bits thrown in is testimony enough. Scrivener is the first piece of software I've encountered that doesn't have a "Save" button for its toolbar! What looks like "Open File" is in fact some other instruction. Nor does it have an "Undo" or "Redo" button. |
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03-28-2014, 04:02 AM | #268 | |
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That's probably because it automatically saves (every two seconds by default). |
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03-28-2014, 01:53 PM | #269 |
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I agree Scrivener has its own way of doing many things. If you don't work through the tutorial you can spend ages trying to figure out where to look up a function you KNOW has to be there. It is not as intuitive as I would like but it offers quite a bit if you can learn to go with its flow. The forums at L&L are a bit, um... zealous at times.
I knew about Hewson's book but I haven't purchased it to see if it is worth it. Anyone here read it yet? |
03-28-2014, 06:14 PM | #270 | |
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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. |
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