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!
LibreOffice was a fork in the mostly defunct OO project. Yes, it is the whole suite. If I recall properly, though, you can choose what to install.
I have never loaded any grammar extensions as I don't use them anyway. It does come with one as a standard install. I don't know what your requirements are.
And I don't know what it is you want from a writing tool. I use Jutoh for eBooks. They also make a writing tool. No idea if it is useful to you or not.
Mike
shelley said:Thank you all for your suggestions. OldBob - why my aversion? Just hate it - a pain to set up and too much real estate wasted across the top, plus I've never liked scrolling up/down pages when reading. Just out of interest, were your books hard copy or ebooks?
I can't argue with that. Those ARE some of the aspects of Word I dislike. But the darn thing DOES work when and where I need it to.
As to the books; I prefer hardcopy, but I have done a short ebook training manual for work using Word.
All that said, I am definitely going to look into scrivener. That program looks very interesting and may help to streamline my writing process.
Good luck in your writing (and search).
--OB