Which Program Do You Use To Write Your Books?

[Nathan Campos]

I love to write tutorials and how-to's for forums, blogs and wiki's, but now I'm writing a book about programming languages integration. Then I want to know wht program you use to write your books

[Nathan Campos]

My pick: Microsoft Works Word Processor
My pick when on Linux: OpenOffice.org

[AJ Starr]

I'm a fan of WordPerfect Word Processor. I won't touch Microsoft products if I can avoid it.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Nathan Campos

My pick: Microsoft Works Word Processor
My pick when on Linux: OpenOffice.org

Nathan, on the assumption that you will have the book edited by a professional editor and/or submit the book to a publisher who will do the same, I strongly suggest that you do not use Microsoft Works. Most editors use Microsoft Word; some use OpenOffice; very few use WordPerfect -- but no professional editor that I know of uses Microsoft Works because it is problematic.

If your manuscript has no formatting and is just plain text, using Works won't matter. But if you do style it (which most authors do), it will need to be converted from Works to a more standard word processing program, which usually means Word. This is necessary because many of the tools used in the editorial and production process are designed to work with Word. What works with Word doesn't work with Works.

That's my 2 cents FWIW.

[Nathan Campos]

Humm, the last time that I've used WordPerfect was on Windows 95.

[Nathan Campos]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Nathan, on the assumption that you will have the book edited by a professional editor and/or submit the book to a publisher who will do the same, I strongly suggest that you do not use Microsoft Works. Most editors use Microsoft Word; some use OpenOffice; very few use WordPerfect -- but no professional editor that I know of uses Microsoft Works because it is problematic.

If your manuscript has no formatting and is just plain text, using Works won't matter. But if you do style it (which most authors do), it will need to be converted from Works to a more standard word processing program, which usually means Word. This is necessary because many of the tools used in the editorial and production process are designed to work with Word. What works with Word doesn't work with Works.

That's my 2 cents FWIW.

I write books that are open-source and use Works because it's my favorite one, then I start formatting it for LaTeX using WinEdt or Emacs

Now you got it?

[jaxx6166]

I've fallen in love with Scrivener for Mac.
My second best friend is still WordXP, nice and reliable.
I haven't quite figured out the grammar/spelling system on the Mac.
Word tends to find more oopsies than Scriv has. Unless I'm doing something wrong

[Nathan Campos]

Originally Posted by jaxx6166

I've fallen in love with Scrivener for Mac.
My second best friend is still WordXP, nice and reliable.
I haven't quite figured out the grammar/spelling system on the Mac.
Word tends to find more oopsies than Scriv has. Unless I'm doing something wrong

I think you need TextMate

[jaxx6166]

Textmate? Whuzzat

[GoblinWriter]

I've been using Pages on the Mac, but only because I've been too lazy to try other programs. I remember someone suggesting one that made it easy to add notes about characters and places and such (not in the text, obviously), but I forget which one it was. Scrivener maybe?

[jaxx6166]

Yeah. It's probably Scriv. Picture a program that lets you make a notebook of index cards and stuff and insert full written pages wherever you want it in there. That's Scriv.

[Nathan Campos]

When I was using Mac. That was on the time of Mac OS 8, I was using Microsoft Word

Originally Posted by jaxx6166

Textmate? Whuzzat

Check out TextMate.
It's the best and fully-features editor for Mac you ever seen!

But I've stoped using Macintosh since the release of the first OS X , because I hate OS X.

[jaxx6166]

Looks like a programmers dream. I gave up with that style of writing in early 2000. My experience was minimal at best. I mostly made cheesy little programs in Visual Basic, tried to teach myself C and then gave up about halfway through C for dummies.

Nowadays I write with words instead of syntax...I think I do a better job of that.

I'm the opposite of you Nathan. I played around on the early PowerPC iMacs. Didn't like them. It pretty much drove me up a wall.

I came back for OSX

And after spending 8 hours yesterday trying to install W7 on a PC, I'm glad I did.

[Steven Lake]

I use open office exclusively for all my writing.

[Solitaire1]

Right now, I use StarOffice Writer (the commercial version of OpenOffice.org's Writer). I chose it over Microsoft (MS) Word because of my dislike for Word and its cost (the entire StarOffice suite cost less than one component of MS Office). Also, I've found Writer to be a very good word processor, it's not as powerful as MS Word but it does just about everything that I need to do when I write.

If you need to convert your MS Works documents into another format, StarOffice will open the files and allow you to save them in other formats. In addition to MS Works, it will also open a large number of formats, including many legacy formats (going back to WordPerfect 4.1, WordStar 3.3, and MS Word 3.x).

Another word processor I can recommend is Jarte. It uses RTF as its native format (it's also a very good text editor) so its documents can be opened with just about any word processor. It's best for the kind of writing that doesn't require elaborate formatting and it has an interface that doesn't get in the way of your writing.

It's available for free (there is also a paid version called Jarte Plus that has a few additional features) and its worth a try. I liked the program so much that after using it for a few months I purchased the paid version.