Best Software for writing?

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he's Virgin Tight™
Ok, ok, ok.... Yes yes, I know about Office, or WordPad, or whatever. What I am asking for, if some of you know, is actual decent software for writing. Like, a program that allows you to organize yourself, write by chapters, etc, and finally at the end publish it all nicely in a PDF file or whatever.

I usually write in Word but its definitely not topnotch for this, and Q10... well Q10 is cool but it doesn't give me what I want/need. I know GAF has a bunch of writers around so if any of you guys have suggestions/recommendations I'd be more than happy to receive them. Thanks in advance.

If it matters... Windows 7 here.
 
Check out yWriter http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html
It basicly organises your whole book. You have different sections for every charactor and scene as well as timeline so you can see if everyone is doing what there supposed to be doing at the right time. The word procesor is very basic (like notepad) but I find it easier to copy paste out of word.

heres a fewture list from the site

Organise your novel using a 'project'.
Add chapters to the project.
Add scenes, characters, items and locations.
Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total.
Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress)
Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals.
Allows multiple scenes within chapters
Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene.
Multiple characters per scene.
Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work.
Re-order scenes within chapters.
Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations.
Automatic chapter renumbering.
... And many more




Oh the best part is it's free!
 
Wait is this for wariting novels or code? my suggestion was obviously only for novels/short etc :)
 
I used LaTeX for writing a paper a few months ago, its really good software. But man, I was incredibly surprised when I typed "latex" into google and got the correct first result.
 
cooljeanius said:
I think Scrivener has received a port to Windows by now? Not sure though; all I know is that the Mac version is great.
Click to expand...
This. Scrivener is a really great and useful piece of software.

The Windows version is still in public beta, what has a nice advantage: It's still free and you can see whether or not it's what you searched for.
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivenerforwindows/

Personally, I like it way more than yWriter.
 
Oh. Some nice suggestions here.

yWriter seems rough around the edges while Scrivener seems to force me to download a new version basically monthly right? Latex somehow sounds too complex XD!
 
I know your on Windows, but I use Pages for Mac and in fullscreen it really helps me focus. This is because it's just a blain black background, with the page in front of you.

Any app that eliminates buttons and bg etc will really help you focus, even if maybe you don't think it will at first.
 
Sentry said:
I know your on Windows, but I use Pages for Mac and in fullscreen it really helps me focus. This is because it's just a blain black background, with the page in front of you.

Any app that eliminates buttons and bg etc will really help you focus, even if maybe you don't think it will at first.
Click to expand...

Q10 does that. It's relaxing to be honest, especially the typewriter sound but... Heh, I get bored of it haha
 
Sentry said:
I know your on Windows, but I use Pages for Mac and in fullscreen it really helps me focus. This is because it's just a blain black background, with the page in front of you.

Any app that eliminates buttons and bg etc will really help you focus, even if maybe you don't think it will at first.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure you can do this with word, or at least have a minimal tool bar.

As for yWriter being rough around the edges it may look plain compaired to mac/win7 apps these days but I found it packed with features and a really helpful organising tool.
 
Since I write across half a dozen platforms depending where/when I am

Google docs. If I wakeup and have an idea? grab my phone toss it in.

At my girlfriends parents place on the weekend for some family thing? Can use my transformer/my phone/her old ass macbook and not have compatibility issues at all.

Just so versatile and the constant saving is the best thing ever.
 
I use either Google Docs or LaTeX. It depends on what kind of time frame your looking at, if you're writing something like a thesis LaTeX is a god-send.
 
What are you trying to write? Since you mention PDF, is it something technical? (PDFs are pretty much worthless except when you want the page layout to exactly mimic a printed page, rather than reflow). Anything else and it's epub that you want to export to.

But anyway, let me echo the yWriter suggestion. I've used it for a couple of different things and it's worked very well.

Yeah, it's kind of ugly, but at the same time, it's gone through 5 major versions and a lot of minor ones so it's very functional.
 
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