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AbiWord?


Aomighty
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Writer, editor and desktop publishing among other things. Not really a typsetter or layout artist but some of the books Im editing might as well be written on Notepad, and freelance clients are usually thankful and impressed if you give them a ms. back with impovements in fonts and layout. Makes it easier to work on sometimes as well.

 

Speaking of which, is a macro the best solution for running a consistent (new) format for scripts (screenplay or stage)? Havent gotten to the point of being disgusted enough to stop simply using TAB key or preset indents. Or does someone know of a program that provides script specific templates?

 

As far as word processing in general, I think its a matter of preference. Some apps are more WYSIWYG, and then there are many people more comfortable (ack!) writing on TEX , LATEX environments. I tend to work visually rather than by any sense of coding , so I need the most intuitive, visual WYSIWYG I can find. With the most options for on the fly troubleshooting and formatting. To me, Abi Word is not as full featured as , say, Writer, but I admit I haven't used it for that much in order to test its limits or lack thereof...

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Writer, editor and desktop publishing among other things.  Not really a typsetter or layout artist but some of the books Im editing might as well be written on Notepad, and freelance clients are usually thankful and impressed if you give them a ms. back with impovements in fonts and layout. Makes it easier to work on sometimes as well.

 

Speaking of which, is a macro the best solution for running a consistent (new) format for scripts (screenplay or stage)?  Havent gotten to the point of being disgusted enough to stop simply using  TAB key or preset indents. Or does someone know of a program that provides script specific templates?

 

As far as word processing in general, I think its a matter of preference.  Some apps are more WYSIWYG, and then there are many people more comfortable (ack!) writing on TEX , LATEX environments.  I tend to work visually rather than by any sense of  coding , so I need the most intuitive, visual WYSIWYG I can find. With the most options for on the fly troubleshooting and formatting.  To me, Abi Word is not as full featured as , say, Writer, but I admit I haven't used it for that much in order to test its limits or lack thereof...

There are dedicated WPs for scrip writing, my brother had one a while ago... but no open source ones that I know of.

 

My writing was for magazines, so it was usually pretty simple and my requirements were basic taxt formatting, spell checking and highlighting. Thankfully we did not use change-tracking at that company, otherwise it would have been Word and Word. No compromise.

 

In my current job (still writing) I use MS Word on my iBook. I have NeoOffice (Open Office native port) running as well, but I use the new MS Word Notebook feature to record interviews with notes quite often and we use track changes sometimes from clients, which Open Office can't do.

 

At least we have no Windows in our entire company, it's all Macs and Linux boxes - and since we do all the writing for the Go Open Source Campaign, we have to use Open Office when dealing with them.

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The only pure scriptwriting WP I know of is Final Draft for Windows. My boss (scripts are one of his sidelines) uses v.5 on Win98 and up, no idea what version it's on now, but it needs the CD to run so WINE use might be a non-starter.

 

You can always start building your own template in OOo by adding paragraph styles for the various components, then save it as a blank document. This works just the same as in M$Word; Start a para, tweak the font/style/margin settings, then write a name in the style box and hit Enter. I find myself doing this all the time because most of the builtin styles are not quite what I need.

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