[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Tony_A20

I've used many word processors and specialized writing applications over the years, and the one I have used for my last six books is OpenOffice Writer. It does everything an author needs to do! I've even used it over the last month to to prepare books for ebook publication because it has HTML output capability.

OOWriter can output directly in PDF format as well as read and write to a dozen or more file formats commonly in use. The only problem is a minor one, it takes a bit of time to understand everything OOWriter can do, and customize it to provide a comfortable writing environment, but it's only a one-time job.

The biggest trick is to understand that OOWriter is a "Style" based application, and a writer has to take the time to create custom styles for pages, paragraphs, headings, etc. if the provided default styles are not enough. Again, it's a one-time job.

In addition, on my 32 inch monitor (writers need lots of room to work) I use i-Finger thesaurus and the Oxford Concise Dictionary, which provide hot-key/mouse click access from Writer, as well as several open files of notes. I also find TextAloud is very useful for proofreading. You can see why I use such a large screen.

For PDF books, I write and format the manuscript in OOWriter, export it as a PDF document, then us Adobe Acrobat Pro for meta-data and any specialized finishing touches.

I stay well away from any MS applications.

Tony

P.S. For html, xhtml, xml work on e-books I use Webuilder.

The PDF creation feature is one of the things I like best about Writer, it makes creating ebooks for my reader extremely easy. It also allows me to see exactly what my ebooks will look like on my reader so I can identify formatting problems and correct them.

I agree about Writer being style based. Due to my experience with MS Word, I was not a fan of styles and tended to avoid them (I looked for a word processor that didn't use styles and that is how I happened upon Jarte [I mentioned it earlier in this thread]). It wasn't until I started using Writer that I found styles to be useful.

With Writer, styles don't get in my way and they allow me to consistently format my ebooks, and achieve affects automatically that would take a great deal of work without styles. Also, mass formatting changes across my entire document are easy to achieve via styles and allows me to easily experiment to find the way I want to format my ebooks.