On Aug 2, 2010, at 19:54 , Alan Taylor wrote: > I've just spent several days surveying the landscape of book-authoring > software. There are a number of ongoing efforts, however the only mature > project is an Apple-only program called Scrivener. > > While I use, and enjoy, OO Writer for my everyday word processing needs, > writing an entire book or dissertation frequently calls for a different > tool. It would be helpful to have a side pane that can be used for > outlining purposes that will, when selected, call up a text for editing > with Writer. A corkboard, or storyboard, would also be very helpful in > organizing large projects and in quickly finding portions of huge, > sprawling documents for editing.
If you haven't already found it, take a look at Master Documents in OOo. I use Scrivener. Before I found it, and I can't remember how I found it, I used Master Documents, which is a good method, but definitely has its limitations, not to say quirks. As far as outlining is concerned in OOo, I can imagine that one could go a very long way by appropriate (long) titles for the subdocuments of a Master Document, so that each subdocument's name was the equivalent of a scene header. Or else you could create a document in which you could write a sentence or two or a whole paragraph describing a portion of the document, and making one or more links to subdocuments in that text. But frankly, Scrivener is so good at its job that I'd say that, for a writer, it would be worth buying a Mac just to be able to use it. You don't need a MacBook, you can run it on a Mac Mini, which here in Sweden goes for the equivalent of about 700 dollars. And on Scrivener's site they refer to other software for other platforms which they think is almost as good. I disagree with them, but you might not. As far as a storyboard, whether cork or not, is concerned, I don't think one is going to find such a thing combined with word processing, as the two operations - placing people and events in time and relation to each other, and composing the story of how they got from A to B - are so unrelated that I and many others can't see them being united in one piece of software. Storylines is a good specimen of this kind of program, and another in development, but also Mac only is Aeon timeline, which shows promise. This is not to say that someone might not take OOo and do some addons or extensions or whatever, which supply the missing bits you describe, but actually trying to incorporate something like this into writer, which is, after all, aimed at all kinds of writers, from simple to-do lists, through business letters, right through to complicated multi-chapter documents via Master Documents, would be asking too much of a universal office program. Sorry if this sounds negative, Alan, but even the most versatile tool in the workshop can not replace the entire tool chest. //James --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
