I've written three books using CDraw because it was easy to set the page up to mimic the pages in print, but I had problems with spell checking, find/replace text, etc in chapters beyond 15 or so pages. Is there anybody who has written a novel (80k+ words) and can recommend a decent piece of software? I'm not looking for bells and whistles or anything that employs templates, just a straightforward writing environment on a Windows laptop. Grammar check is a must as I seem to be word blind to what's actually typed! Not MS Word, please!
I haven't used WordPerfect Office. But I can say, from personal experience, MS Word has no problem at all with large files for search / replace or anything else. And the newer versions are stellar for layout. I am on my fifth novel 0f 130,000+ words each without a hiccup. And everybody I've found can deal with DOC files, if not DOCX. --OB
Edit to add: I meant to ask; why the aversion to Word?