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!
It's really interesting that we have a professional software like Corel Draw what was developed for professional printing&web and for book writing/printing here are suggested other softwares.
Why? Long document applications have always been specialty software, in the early days the plug-in for Quark was $1,200 and FrameMaker was also very expensive. The only reasonable priced long document application was Corel Ventura and it could easily handle 3 or 4,000 pages but the demand for long document applications is very small now. CorelDraw is a great general graphic application but is just a poor choice for long documents and on this site I believe people tend to offer as good advice as possible.
I paid $300 for Ventura 10
I just paid $99 for a 2TB drive on sale.