Windows/Mac: Scrivener, the word processing app with advanced outlining, corkboard notes, and other stuff writers like, is celebrating National Novel Writing Month with extended previews of its upcoming 2.0 Mac version, and a brand new Windows version. They’re both great text-focused tools. More »
Windows only: Add-on utility WriteSpace turns Microsoft Word 2007 into a distraction-free writing environment with the push of a button—making productive writing easy. Once installed, switching to distraction-free mode is simple—go to the View tab and click the WriteSpace button to immediately switch into full-screen mode with a slick animated effect. The writing area can be resized by moving your mouse to the left until the divider lights up, and dragging the window to your preferred size. You can always turn Word into a distraction-free editor without additional software, but this utility makes it dead simple. WriteSpace is free and open source, available for Windows only. Thanks, Aaron Parker!
WritespaceZoho, the ever-improving online editing suite, is rolling out Zoho Writer 2.0, comprising of a serious overhaul of the menu and writing interface and features pulled from user requests. Along with the new drop-down menus pictured above, the ubiquitous Zoho sidebar now sports a search feature, multiple document selections by holding Control and clicking, and a few other improvements. The documents themselves get auto-insertion of header and footer fields, word and character counts in the status bar. All in all, Zoho Writer now has a striking resemblance to your average word processor, and a lot of the buttons and options explain themselves a bit better.
Windows/Mac/Linux: TextFlow is an Adobe AIR-based word processor with a new and innovative take on document collaboration. Rather than offer real-time updates when multiple users are working on a document like Google Docs, Zoho Writer, or previously mentioned Gobby, TextFlow imports multiple Microsoft Word documents, analyses all of the differences, and provides robust tools for merging, accepting, or rejecting any of the changes therein by a master editor. Say, for example, you send a document to several co-workers. Even if you track the changes, you’d still need to manually merge all the suggestions and changes into one document once they got back to you. On the other hand, you could drag and drop all of the documents into TextFlow and let it analyse the differences, making it significantly easier to create a single document using the best changes available and without making mistakes. When you’re done, just export the final result back to a Microsoft Word doc. If you’re still not entirely convinced, check out TextFlow’s intro video for a better idea of how it works.
TextFlow [via CNET]Windows/Linux: Free application Go-oo is a fork of the popular Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org focusing on speed and greater compatibility. If you’ve ever used OpenOffice.org, Go-oo’s load speed may blow your mind the first time you launch it, and it maintains a relatively small footprint while you’re using it. The actual look and feel of Go-oo is the same as OpenOffice.org because it’s essentially the same application (it’s even still called OpenOffice.org). It is, however, stripped of some of the new features available in OO.org 3.0. Go-oo is free, Windows and Linux only. If you’re a frequent OO.org user and you give it a try, let’s hear how it compares in the comments.
Go-oo [via OStatic]Windows only: Jarte is a free portable word processing application built on the framework of Microsoft Wordpad. Don’t be deceived by its spartan lineage though; Wordpad serves only as the undercarriage of Jarte’s feature set. Jarte is designed around the most frequent needs of the average user. By putting commonly used tools and features in the menus immediately accessibly by the toolbar buttons, users aren’t left digging through menus when they’d rather be writing. Jarte supports tabbed based word processing, dictionary files, spell check, and a favourites system for bookmarking favourite folders, files, and fonts. Jarte is freeware, Windows only. Thanks cohomology!
JarteOpenOffice.org only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Sun PDF Import extension imports and edits PDFs with the free Microsoft Office alternative OO.org. Rather than import the PDFs into the Writer program, the extension works with OO.org’s Draw application. Once imported, you can still edit text or other portions of the document. The extension isn’t perfect, but it appears to be under active development and could come in really handy under the right circumstances. The Sun PDF Import extension is free, works wherever OpenOffice.org 3.0 does. Want to learn more about whether OO.org can replace Office? Check out our first look at the latest release. Sun PDF Import Extension [OpenOffice.org via MakeUseOf]
The Google Operating System blog uncovers a few snippets of JavaScript which add features to Google Docs, like a document table of contents, a thesaurus, and encyclopedia. For example, to generate a table of contents using your document’s headings, enter this into the address bar while your doc is open:
Being on top of your grammar is a skill that takes years of practice to refine into unthinking craft, but even the most word-minded among us can trip up when it comes how keyboards transpose our thoughts. Blogger Christopher Phin releases his inner copy editor and points out 10 errors one sees everywhere in digital writing, mostly due to not knowing what characters go exactly where. As someone who over-uses the “m-dash” a bit, I was glad to get schooling in the finer points of horizontal lines:
