Software for Authors

Posted by MadaboutDana
May 17, 2011 at 12:31 PM

As a copywriter (and translator), I’m sympathetic to the KISS argument: you just want to get words down, you don’t want to faff about with lots of complex commands, structures etc.

But I do find it’s good to be able to scatter words around so you can gather them together again afterwards. Which is what led to my interest in outliners in the first place - you can have lots of fragments in an outliner, but you can restrict the ones you work with and/or move them about into more coherent groups as you start to isolate the main traits of a specific concept.

Which means that increasingly, I’ve looked for outliners or similar software that use columns or other side-by-side metaphors, so you can easily compare stuff, move it around, delete/expand it etc. But columns are also rather restrictive.

Word, for me, just doesn’t hack it: it’s the last link in the chain, the final output engine - if indeed I use it at all.

For shorter stuff, I generally use TreeSheets (http://www.treesheets.com) - especially now that the Wonderful Wouter has added folding - or OpenOffice Sheet (which is far more powerful than Excel when used as a word processor). Both programs allow you to drag stuff around all over the page.

Increasingly I also use stuff on my brand spanking new iPad, and the two things I use most often are Numbers (which I’ve already eulogised elsewhere) and OmniOutliner (which has just been released for iPad). I’ve also experimented with Circus Ponies Notebook on iPad, but it’s still hampered by a number of minor but annoying stability issues. I also occasionally use Pages, which has many of the same strengths as Numbers (but doesn’t allow you to run multiple worksheets simultaneously, which is where Numbers definitely wins out). The main benefit of both Numbers and Pages is the ease with which you can create text boxes, then drag them around on the page - the Word text-box approach is horribly clunky by comparison.

Once I’ve got something together I’m happy with, I’ll import it into Word - if I really have to. For the last couple of creative projects, however, I’ve exported my ideas directly out of Numbers (to PDF) for forwarding to the client. In fact I also posted the end-results for the last one up on iWork.com, which was an interesting departure.

I confess that I do use a keyboard with my iPad, so you could argue that I’d be better off with a MacBook running the full versions of Numbers and/or OmniOutliner. And I wouldn’t entirely disagree… except that as a creative writer, it’s enormously useful to be able to drop what you’re doing and jot down a brilliant idea that’s suddenly occurred to you, and that’s where the iPad wins out - instant on, instant off. Come to think of it, it’s what I used to do on my ancient Packard-Bell handheld PC (still running, although it’s now over 10 years old). I actually preferred Pocket Word (basically equivalent to Windows Write) to the full version of Word, because it’s much faster and simpler (and a couple of small MS plugins give you wordcounts and spelling).

My other favourite on the PC is The Guide, which is one of the simplest, neatest two-pane outliners of all.

But I’m a sucker for new software (you may have noticed!), and I use plenty of others like Smereka TreeProjects, Zim, UV-Outliner, NoteCase, AM-Notebook and EssentialPIM, depending on what I feel like and what structures the project takes on. EssentialPIM, for example, has unrivalled support for HTML export - it’s spectacularly good for storing/outputting the results of previous work, especially translations.

All of them do have this in common, however: they’re relatively simple, and don’t rely on complex tagging/categorisation/linking/filtering to work fast and well. Until the ultimate semantic application has emerged, such simplicity - coupled with a reasonably competent search function - is (for me) the best option. Things like tags, categories, filters etc. are nice (I love them in ListPro), but can also act as a constraint.

Writing vs. info management - it’s a really tricky balancing act!