I've heard good things about the Scrivener fiction writing tool. It's one of these tools that tries to encapsulate everything you need for a complex writing project into one tool. I'm suspicious of that approach, but it has interesting features and there is a free beta right now, so I'm trying it.
Here's a link to the Windows beta page, which is what is new now. The Mac version has been out for a while.
I installed it this morning and had a look. It has a lot of nice features, I have to say.
- Built in templates for short stories and novels. It also has screenwriting and nonfiction; I'm just not interested in it for those as I have lots of tools for that stuff and that's my day job anyway.
- You basically write stuff as chunks of text...but every chunk has an
attached index card of comments/metadata that won't show up in print,
and you can view and manipulate the cards separately.
In general it seems a great tool for any project where you want to have a lot of notes and associate them with your final text.
- You have a treeview of all the stuff in your writing project.
- It supports PDF, RTF, XHTML, DOC, DOCX and LibreOffice/OpenOffice ODT outputs. Note that DOCX and ODT are XML outputs.
It works a lot like an xml toolchain, in that you are producing source
files that get compiled into final output. But it hides the
implementation and has a good GUI for it.
So the only complaint I could possibly make about it is that it's not
open source so I can't (presumably) hack at the guts of it. I think the
price when it is out is gonna be $40, too, which seems super reasonable.
The other thing I'd want is an XML output that semantically marks all the notes and metadata in a simple and easy to understand way. An output like that would allow you to post-process it with XML tools, so you could completely customize it. I wonder if they use XML under the covers or if everything is just in a database.
Not sure if I'll get around to trying an actual project in it before the
9/30 end of the beta. That would be the best test. I don't feel a
strong NEED for this thing though...but I would seriously consider it
for a novel. That, to me, is where it would shine: it would really help you manage multiple layers of story structure.
As several tools have offered recently, it has a full-screen editing mode too, for when you want to focus on churning out some prose.
It would be hard to lose: even if you decided later that you didn't like
it, it would be easy to get your data back out of it and into some
other format.
I've had the Mac version of Scrivener long enough to have updated it once. I like it, especially the corkboard feature and the way you can easily track every appearance of a given character or place throughout an entire manuscript. Of course, I haven't spent enough time writing to really justify the expense, and I don't think it's particularly helpful for writing shorter fiction, but if you want to tackle a novel, it's handy stuff.
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