Question What word processing program do you use and why?

Also, did this program come with the computer you bought or did you have to buy it and if so......for how much? I was working on two different stories and hit a horrible brick wall (on both for different reasons) and then my laptop went belly up. The thumb drive back up was lost and the software I was using disappeared. SIGH. I can recreate most of it from memory, if not all of it, and I AM ready to continue......but was wondering about the wpps used and which ones are least likely to cause hiccups in getting published here.

Wordsmith

My first word processor was Norton Textra , whose 5 1/4 floppy Disks and spiral bound manual I think I still have in storage. It sucked, but it was one of the first. In 1994 I was a beta tester for Office 95 , which was orders of magnitude better. I continued to use MS Word through it's various incarnations through Office XP.

I was turned off by the radical redesign of the GUI in Office 10 and switched to Open Office which I've used since. It's a robust program with a classic, easily intuitive UI, though I still save all my work in the original WordXP format rather than the OpenOffice format. It's also free, which is a major plus. Everything I've written since 2010 was written in Open Office.

For saving stories once they've been published, I use LibreOffice. From that I can generate PDFs or share out the .odt file. I miss the change logging of FrameMaker (and even Word), but it's not bad for marking up a text for editorial comments. Some day, someone's going to torque me off and they'll get a PDF manually-annotated in gimp.

Lately I've been using a mix of Pluma, gedit, and xmlcopyeditor for composing, Firefox to confirm layout, and the online version of Grammarly for cleanup. Why? Because cutting and pasting text back and forth between the CMS's JCE editor ... and just about anything is a recipe for pain.



JCE manages some tidying up of text as it stores the file in the CMS, but some of its character conversions aren't the same choices that your software uses. As a consequence, I write for the site using HTML markup for all the structural heavy lifting and extended character sets. As I see it, a text medium shouldn't need a lot of "artistic formatting" unless the scene I'm writing ends up so complex that the artifice is needed if the reader's to have any hope of following it.

Wordsmith wrote: Also, did this program come with the computer you bought or did you have to buy it and if so......for how much?

Welcome to the happy world of false dichotomies. None of these programs came with my computer. Only the Grammarly license (which isn't installed) was paid for out of pocket (next year might come to about US$139 without a good discount coupon), though I have donated to a few projects on occasion.

This thread would be more appropriate to the "Tool Room" subforum. There are threads there with a number of suggestions of different software. But, in a nutshell, there is no generic "right" answer. There are various tools available, and you might want to try a number of them to see which of them best serves your purpose and workflow.

Personally, for writing of the creative sort I tend to work in a full-fledged word processor, mostly for the spellcheck and revision management features (the "grammar check" tends to be too business-oriented to be useful for creative writing). I'm sorta ashamed to admit I use Word 2010 -- a copy I got back when M$ had a program aimed for developers that allowed you to purchase essentially every goddamn Microsoft business product for a symbolic fee, ostensibly for "testing purposes" but with no actual limitations. Now that Office 2010 is near End-of-Life, I'll probably migrate to LibreOffice -- for a long time, the only thing actually keeping me from using it full time was that Open/LibreOffice text-comparing tool was really weak in comparison to M$'s. But it has improved a lot since then, so it's no longer a problem.

Some people may prefer a Web-based editor; there are a number of those around, not limited to the Google and Microsoft offerings, and most of them offer at least an entry level for free. The advantage of such a product is that your work is saved online by default, and you may switch devices without worrying about sync issues or setting everything up to use online storage yourself. The disadvantage is that they tend to be a bit less responsive and a bit less full-featured.

There are a few no-frills word processors around that might be helpful to avoid distractions. FocusWriter (donationware) and Jarte (freeware, unsupported) come to mind.

And there are tool specifically designed for creative writing, such as yWriter (freeware, mostly-Windows) and Scrivener (commercial, Mac-only). Some people swear by them. Some people swear at them.

Longtime email/forums/USENET users may feel comfortable with a markdown-style editor instead of a regular word processor. Those tend to be very lightweight and free, but they limit your formatting options quite a bit. Which may be helpful for some people.

The thing about word processors, though, is that they produce really bad, really bloated HTML. When the time comes to clean up cruft and tighten up the formatting, I prefer diving into the actual HTML code and hand-tweak it. For that, nothing beats a good plaintext editor. I'm still too attached to a product I bought years ago named NoteTab Pro, but if I were to choose one today, I would probably go to Notepad++, which is free/libre and has a number of features (such as full Unicode support) that NoteTab lacks. But I'm a bit set on my ways, and I have a lot of custom automation already done for NoteTab, so migrating is difficult... people with more of a programming bent might prefer things like Vim, Emacs or Visual Studio, but I'm not one of those.

I'm a weirdo, so I do all my creative writing in Vim using Markdown formatted text files, and for anything longer than a novella I use a separate file for each part or chapter, plus a few extra files for configuration, notes, etc. I track changes and synchronize across devices with Git. When I'm ready to publish, I run a Python program I built to assemble the source files into whatever output format I'm targeting.

This workflow isn't for everyone, but it satisfies my inner programmer by keeping content separate from presentation and making it easy to support multiple export targets. It also gives me much tighter and more reliable formatting since it's defined by code and config files rather than something I have to remember to do manually while writing the story. This way there's no stress that a stray click might mess up my margins or that falling asleep at my keyboard might send a random keystroke that subtly changes my line spacing midway through the story. Took some work to set up, but the peace of mind is great.

I started out using Text Edit, back on the ancient dinosaur Mac I had. Then I moved to LibreOffice when I moved to PC.

I use OpenOffice myself after MS started to require you to be on line to use their products.

I write and organize using Scrivener. It's nice - I have a catalog of characters / organizations / etc in a template that I use and expand as I add more stories. I like it - a LOT. For final, I export to Word, then publish to the site.

I use LibreOffice. I'm not giving Microsoft money for their SHIT Word.