Greetings...
While rambling in my latest work I lost track of my timeline. This caused me a rather awkward set of revisions to make everything fit. Easy mistake to make if the plot is complex and there are a number of charactors. Besides my own frustration I've seen the question asked on Yahoo answers multiple times. To date I've sent people to Abiword and been thanked many times for that suggestion. For me Abiword is great for final edits but not for the actual writing process. I decided to see if there was a better way. The only tool I found in that search was LyX. In a short time using it I have this feedback. Sorry about the timing. Apparently I caught you guys just before a release. Also excuse my breach in ettiquete. I'm not a patient man :) Here is the raw feedback edited in LyX. First is the editor won't let me use the enter key to create my own sense of formating. This is rather irritating. Very annoying actually. Now I'm stuck in indent hell. Nor can I manually add a blank line between paragraphs. I am sure there is a formating option to do this but I disagree with the default design. Now the wrap around lets me defeat the indent hell. I think that is backwards. Useing the scrollwheel in file selections breaks the file selection box. I am using a Logictech trackball on FC3. The next issue I noticed is I cannot copy the version info in the help about. That is annoying if you want to do a bug report. A user should be able to select and copy that text. The LyX version I tried was 1.3.7 Frontend xforms host type i686-redhat-linux-gnu. I can provide the rest but will have to type it by hand apparently. I could not find a word count utility. It'd be really helpfull to have a real time count displayed for article writing. Word counts are essential for shorter novels, they are also very important in many novel submissions. A page count using various methods, especially the double spaced format most publishers insist upon would also be very usefull. I noticed filters for M$ word docs. But see now way to export to them. Many places require that horrible format to be able to submit. I do like the bookmarks concept. That is very important in a long document. The built in Thesaurus is also a very essential and good idea. The Index feature is also well done. Though I would love to use 2 different indexes, One a timeline index, the other a conventional index. The display of the index should be in a sidebar. Especially a timeline index that you would constantly refer back too. Pulling up index references should open in a split window. The reason you are often refering back to bookmarks and timeline index is to write/cut and paste while refering to a past reference/event. It might be merely not to repeat yourself or it might be a flashback or to add detail on events that have transpired before. There might be a way to use the Lists feature to do that. Not sure. The ability to change the default document root is nice. I personally have a dir structure along these lines. homdir/Writing/genre/project so this could be rather annoying to have to reset the document root every time I change project. Given I work in about a dozen genres/sub genres and have dozens of projects. The effort to constant change the document root would become noticable overhead. There is no possible way I would even consider keeping those thousands of files in the same single huge writing dir. The documents menu is not sticky. If I do not hold down the mouse button and then mouse down to the document I cannot select one. This is a major annoyance and I saw no preference to change the default behavior of that. It makes grabbing the wrong document very easy to do. Combined with the lack of identification of the revision it could be possible to do great harm to yourself by accident. I very much like the notes feature that you have. That is very well done. The built in revision control is a nice feature but not real intuitive how to use it and no visual clue as to what version is in the current window. So if you were editing a third revision and went back to copy from a first draft something you deleted but later wanted to add back in it might be really easy to get confused as to which revision you were currently working on. The revision should be identified up with the file name. Now to explain what led me to try LyX. To give you an idea why, let me explain how I write. Most writers either build the big picture first developing all of the major plot twists, the ending and the basics. They do this in an outline then start filling in details, often in waves much like a painter who starts with a sketch then adds layer after layer of color to achieve the effect they are looking for. Often they write from the ending back to the beggining. The other style is with more of a loose outline. That is you know what you want to build, the inbetween and even sometimes the ending is unknown to the author until the story is already well developed. I tend to be the latter. When I write I don't know any more than the reader how the story ends. When I write it's like I open a window to a world and I'm doing my best to keep up with the events as they happen and translate enough shorthand to later go back and add in detail. I can pump out hundreds of pages of these in week. The detail side is tedious and takes months. In both cases a crucial part of the process is the timeline. If the story does not involve a very sequential series of events then it is quite easy to get out of synch. This can of course be very disconcerting to the reader if not corrected. Disconcerting to the author as well. The best example is one from a series of books most Linux users have probably read. The Lord of the Rings that is. At points the party gets seperated. Events transpire in parralell but they do interact at points. When you get to those points and anything done such as the number of days leading up to those interactions have to mesh or you pull the reader out of the world you've built for them and lost that suspension of belief that is so essential to telling a good tale. Different authors use different means to deal with timelines. Some cover thier walls in giant structures of notes. Most today use pen and paper, often creating folders which with many artifacts besides the timeline. Few do this on a computer today becuase there are few applications that do a very good timeline and no software actually supports built in timelines. The way I currently work is I devote a virtual desktop to that particuler story. All of my windows including web browser windows are held in that workspace. One per story and often one devoted where I'll have a few shorter projects like articles. I dispise VI and Emacs. I've been using Linux pretty much exclusivly both at work and at home since 2000 and part time 97-2000. I have yet to find one thing I like about either LOL. My day job has been often as a Linux sys admin. I'm sorry I hate those two editors. Anyway I use Kedit since it's lightweight, has all the basic editing functions I need for my primary writing. I use little in the way of text formating. Too much hassle getting it to translate between formats and also it is too often overused and becomes a distraction to the reader. So I do my formating as a late edit in revisions. Not much point wasting time on formating text when large portions of it will be snipped or re-written anyway. Then I'll just have to reformat it. Then I'll get feedback which concentrates on the formating not the actual text which means my first roughs I show to people I strip the formating out of anyway. So why bother until you are getting ready for final versions. When writing tech docs, yeah your only going to have a few if any revisions. Makes sense to slap formating in then. Lyx seems really geared to technical writers but there are issues even for technical writers. I typicaly write only 200-300 lines per Kedit box then go on to the next. I have a naming convention to help keep the chapter, part of the chapter and revision in the name of the file. I often pull up a Kate window per chapter for pieces I've already written. The reasons I do this is with a 300 page document the time it takes to find a specific paragraph can be more than long enough to anger the muse. By the time you find the piece you want to look back at I lose my train of thought, my rythem. It's basically an end of a writing session for me. By cutting it all up in smaller chunks I can remember generally where something happens and in seconds to minutes find the text I'm looking for. I often add into my time line the file and line where really important events take place. This way I can look up details without breaking my rythem and can output hundreds of pages in a weekend writing session. Wish the edits were that quick. I could output a novel a month if they were. Then when I'm happy with a chapter as a dirty rough I concantonate the mini chapter files and pull them into Abiword for grammer and spelling checks. Eventually I concantonate the chapters together in successive revisions. Finally as I start to get close to something I'd actually consider submitting I create a formated version, start on synopis and other details. For me even when I start with a fleshed out outline I often change enough that a synopsis is worthless until I am in my later revisions. So a synopisis is one the last things I do on a writing project. Trying to work in a single window with one huge document just does not work for most writers. Hence the various methods of keeping track of details. Obviously that is not the best way to do things. For me I'd rather have a row of tabs much like done in Kate or Firefox. These would be the chapters or other customizable means of organization allowing you to group documents in one or more of the tabs. Then each tab would have a tab for each document in that chapter/group. For me the ideal writing system would allow me to first segment chapters up in tabs, then peices of the chapters. There would be automatic indexing, especially of name/event keywords. Something that could easily be accomplished with a simple keystroke combination so as to not upset the rythem of writing. The one thing many pieces of software targeted toward creative endeavors seem to forget is that writing/composing/drawing are creative endeavors. You cannot just turn it on and off. If you are delayed or distracted enough then the world is lost to you. How can you possibly emerse a reader into the world you are creating if you cannot stay there yourself while the world pours forth onto the page? So editing needs to be unobtrusive and quck. The reason for the subdivisions is to display key points in the novel down at the bottom. Preferably using a split screen so that you can easily read/copy&paste back and forth. For example in my first novel, a work of Fantasy, there is a critical battle that shapes the future of the hero of the story. I refered back to that battle many times in the course of the book. The description of the village which the hero came from was another couple pages I constantly refered back too as was encounters with critical charactors, a 2nd battle much later in the book and the meeting of his true love. Often I spin the tale telling the basics then flashing back for ever more detail as the relivence of that detail became obvious to the reader and to emphasize how an event related past/present. I seem to have the same memory constraints most writers do. Amazingly mine seems a little better. Many writers keep entire paper folders devoted to charactors with pictures of people whom they've based that charactor on. I conjure my charactors mostly from thin air and can remember what the main charactors look like very well. It's the side charactors that I re-introduce later on that trip me up. Two chapters after I introduce a charactor they might come back and play an important role in the book. 2 chapters is a long time sometimes. I might not even remember what hair color the charactor had by then. I want to see what I wrote previously AS I type in the new text, not have to swap back and forth. Sometimes the details I am looking for are rather complex. The way LyX is currently I'd have to copy and paste that info into a Kedit window which would eventually lead me right back using Kedit again. Formating is important and depending on what you are doing and who it is for that can vary. Many places want plain text. Some places only accept paper copies. Some will not even read formated text, some expect the formating to already be in there. Some want your text submited as Word files, some as plain text, some as Word Perfect, some as HTML and a few will accept a few formats including RTF. The lack of export support is a potential issue though I'm sure I could export to text then import in Abiword or Open Office. Might even be able to save the formating thorugh such an operation but the extra step is a bit of a hassle. Is is as I said something I do very late in the writing proccess. Grammer checking is an essential part of writing. Without a grammer checker I'd have no chance of being published as poor as mine is. Spell checking is another obvious tool. Diction and style would be very helpfull. Abiword does a good job checking grammer but when it finds a grammar error it doesn't tell you what is wrong. Knowing what rule of grammer you violated would be really helpfull both in improving grammar and also as to whether to correct it or not. Grammar checkers should also allow you to skip quoted text where many grammer errors are intentional and part of giving a charactor a consistant rythem of speech. Because I split my story between many files global search and replace would be really helpfull. What is just as crucial is built in version control. Undo is a nice thing but been more than once where I removed pages of text. Changed a direction of the story then decided the origional was better but the origional was lost between versions. My primitive versioning system is also prone to errors. The manual file naming alone leaves many opportunities for mistakes. I've in the past forgot to save before making edits and obliterated an entire pice of a revision. Unless it was old enough to make it into a back up that meant I lost that piece of revision forever. Revision diff would also be really helpfull. For some to go into Outline mode, that is to click a button and see the outline with segments of the outline broken into chapters and sub chapters would be very usefull. To all writers it would be really usefull for editing and searching. Then to drill into the section you wanted to work on the details of or perhaps print a whole subchapter right from there. Support for CUPs and GUI level printing would be really helpfull. Sometimes ps is not what you want. For example on one machine, the one I do most of my writing from I have a nice inkjet set up as a local printer. On another machine I have a network shared dot matrix I like to use for printing rough drafts for review. I've set up networked printers to be accesable by ps before but it's been a long time since I did that. Far easier to use CUPs and do network printing from the print dialog. So a really nice feature of a writer's editor would be the ability to something like ctr-d-c and fill out a charactor sheet with basics and even include the ability to add pics and wave files for later reference. While I myself wouldn't use the pics many authors would. A graphical tree of the chars relationship to other chars would be another really usefull feature. Very similer too or literally geneological. Depends on the story and the charactors involved. If a story spans generations then it's very usefull to have that genological information in an easy to read format but that can be added to or edited on the fly from within the writing. The way I'd display the charactors would be on the right a toolbar similer to Firefox's history bar. Names of the charactors would be there. A click would bring up a popup with charactor details formating along these lines. Name age, traits (Eye color,hair(wavy,curly,etc, color,length,),height,weight) ,relationship links Free for all text description. A place for a pic for those who use pics and even possibly a sound file place for some authors who might use a wav file to describe vocal charactoristics/accents. History drill down for the charactor. Many writers will write little novelettes about each char describing thier entire life story in shorthand. Key thing is it is availible to read WHILE you type. Otherwise it interferes with your rythem and forces you to switch back and forth. Many will just skip the whole process and do it in a seperate editor and or on paper still if you have to swap back and forth. I am writing this not as a criticism of what is a well recomended piece of software. I just know what I want myself as a writer. I also have a writer's and a developers viewpoint. So I'm sharing that perspective from as a writer. So I figure I can do a few things. Present some ideas. If you guys like all or most of them I'd be really happy to help in any way I could. Testing, documentation, design, etc. If not, maybe a few of the ideas are usefull to you. You get an idea how at least one writer works and some input from the styles of other writers I know. The simple reality is few writers today do much more than put the final words down on a computer. Many still write with pen and paper or old fashioned typewriters. Part of the reason is the ability to plaster those things accross a wall, carry them around with them and so on. Much of it is because software either doesn't support such functions or because the way it's supported is intrusive to the mood of writing. There is a reason writers are well known as recluses and why they are known to seek out quiet non-distracting places to write. The same needs to exist on the machine they use to write. They need to be able to set up an environment that fits writing and doesn't interfere with the writing process. I think I can help build something like that. I need software like what I described. Many tools that are essential like word counts are easy to add. Adding a feature that tells displays a running word count would be really usefull for writing articles instead of the normal method of going off on a topic then once the main idea is down doing a word count check, then trimming or expanding to meet the target word count. If your halfway into an article and glance at the running word count and see you've used up 3/4ths of your word count then brevity becomes your best friend. If your halfway into your ideas and you have less than a third of your word count then it's time to get into more detail. Those are some of the tools I'd like to have in a Writers peice of software. There are lots of other whiz bang features that are far less essential. Being able to feed mp3 lists specific to a project for example. When I'm writing Fantasy I want ancient and mystical sounding tunes. I'll play David Arkenstone, Lorenna McKennit, Pink Floyd, Days of the new, etc. If I'm writing an action adventure I'll be listening to Metalica, Iron Maiden, Iommi's solo stuff, Sabbath, etc. Niether of those are good when writing about network security. Unless it's AGGRESSIVE network security. Then Metalica might be good. The list could be fed to your player of choice. Me it's XMMS. Hopefully I've at least contributed a usefull idea or two. I'd really like to see something along the lines of what I've described. Thanx for reading my rants.
