Home Premium. I'm not sure why you'd have any problems with Ultimate as opposed to that, since they are all different variants of the same platform now (as opposed to the way they used to do it with NT and FAT16/32). Maybe there's an add-on part of the program that causes problems, but I'd just go in and shut that part down. And no, I know you're not bragging. I should've stated more specifically what I was using. Very important when it comes to hardware/software.
The one thing nobody has mentioned is longevity. It's an issue I'm wrestling with just now, having just upgraded to Mountain Lion on a new Mac Mini (replacing my old Mini running Leopard.) I started working with ClarisWorks back in 1994, switched to AppleWorks, then to Pages '08. Now I'm at Pages '09. As usual, I'm going to have to go through my entire documents folder, opening each one and converting it to the newest version. Thankfully they are all perfectly upgradeable, but what IS a problem is the time it takes to do this. I write, I have a 'finished' novel containing 38 chapters (as individual documents) with many versions which I've changed (and yes, I do go back quite frequently, either to check on something or restore an older portion), a new novel containing 4 chapters, and many research documents as well as a couple with running 'notes.' Oh, and four short story beginnings as well. All of these extend as far back as 1996. Know what? I'm fed up. Does anybody know of a way to convert these files as folders, rather than as individual documents? Last time I did this, it took me nearly two weeks. And that was 5 years ago. I've created a hell of a lot since then. So what am I looking at here? Middle of October? I don't think any wordprocessors take into account how long a writer might hang on to work. Both finished AND partly finished work. Having to upgrade each file every 5 years or so is a major hassle.
I'm pretty sure LibreOffice and Open Office (both variants of the same software) are backward compatible to the earliest days of the .odt format. I certainly have no problem switching between different versions, or loading old files I wrote years ago. Word's not so good. I had to install an old version from the Windows 3.1 era to open Word for Mac documents from the mid-90s.
The good thing about Open Office is that it allows me to save my documents in .doc format (so people with MS Word can view it). Does anyone really use .odt now at days?
Scrivener had me at hello on this issue-- I see Scrivener saves a project as individual .rtf rich text files (one for each chapter of a novel, etc). I suspect .rtf file format readability will be around for a long time, has been. Same for .xml which e.g. is what Final Draft (screenwriting) software uses as its native format for screenplays-- very open, transparent (unlike Movie Magic Screenwriter which uses a cryptic closed file format; no secret why Final Draft .fdx files are much more portable and have become more widespread for import/export in various software programs (Trelby, Scrivener, FadeIn).
I've actually ordered a book on Scrivener, which should reach me tomorrow. I'm pretty close to saying 'yes.'
Most people who use Open/Libre Office? You wouldn't use it to share documents with Word users since Microsoft won't write an .odt importer for Word, but I don't see the point in using .doc files when writing with OO/LO when you can trivially export to .doc if you have to.
I've used yWriter for a while, but it had the annoying habit of crashing and making me lose a week of work, so I switched back to MS Word 2010. I've only heard good stories about Scrivener, but I think I'll stick to using Word for now.
When I was a newbie writer, I went through a phase that involved every program marketed to writers (and many that were just average word processors) you can imagine. I've used most of those mentioned here and many that haven't been. That phase lasted about a year. I eventually realized those programs weren't what I needed and many of them had features that only served to distract me. I didn't need to be able to create scenes or whatever. I'd play with the features, but they weren't actually useful. All I needed was to be able to type the story beginning to end (which is how I work) without being sidetracked. Back to MS Word I went.
Perfectly right! I started writing (on computers, that is) with Lotus Ami Pro. Next step was Lotus... Word-something-or-other. Then Lotus stopped doing word processors and now I can hardly open my files, and when I do, they're corrupted. So now, I use something that will never die: LaTeX. It's been around since the 1980s and it's still there and highly popular. Not primarily for fiction writing, admittedly, but it's always going to be around.
I suspect LaTeX isn't for Mac? I've never heard of it, but it sounds sensible. Damn. Just got a book about Scrivener, and was reading it last night. Not really for me, after all, I don't think. Not only is Scrivener incredibly complex (dare I say over-inflated? A million-dollar bridge over a ten-cent river?), but the one feature that tips it into 'no' territory for me is its 'automatic save' function. I like to write and edit freely, saving only what I want to save when I'm ready to save it. I always begin every editing job with a duplicate of the original, so I can easily revert back if I want to. Scrivener's automatic save seems to save everything you're doing at intervals, whether you are just experimenting or what. And of course each 'save' creates another file on your computer. Apparently, once your files become congested, Scrivener starts making room by deleting your oldest ones! And this is supposed to be designed for WRITERS? I don't think so. Unless everybody else writes differently from me, and doesn't care what Scrivener decides to save or delete. I think I'll stick to Pages for now. It also has an automatic 'save' function, but at least the Mountain Lion preferences allow you to over-ride it. For now. I'm beginning to think I'll end my writing life using a pen and paper. I want total control over what I do, and the newer systems and software seem hell-bent on taking it away. Now we're supposed to store everything we do in a 'cloud' and not bother making physical backups? Aye. And what happens when that all goes pear-shaped? We await developments.
I don't even use a word processor--I use BBEdit, a text editor, on my Mac. It does have a lot of tools for juggling text (search and replace, grep, etc.), but no formatting. If and when I get to the point that I want to submit work I'll buy a copy of Word, but for now plain text works just dandy for me. (And the odds of corruption issues are certainly wildly reduced, while the odds of compatibility issues are essentially zero.) I'll have to convert words that I've emphasized like _this_ to italics, and maybe format a few block quotes, and...well, that's all I can really think of, aside from formatting the entire document en masse to the right font, size, line spacing, paragraph indenting, and so on.
If i ever write on my computer (ima pen-and-paper type) i use word, its simpler than trying to figure out these other ones... though when ive got my coding up to a good enough standard, ill create my own one
Yes, working in a plain text format certainly makes the whole thing 'convertible.' However, it doesn't work if your writing contains italics and/or special characters (like the accents in foreign words.) For that, you need Rich Text Format, which is the next step up, and is also very convertible. The Mac's TextEdit programme, which comes installed free with any OSX incarnation, is actually a good wee programme for the initial writing stages.
I'm on Mac and I use Pages, which is an equivalent of Word, only so much more elegant and better (in my opinion). I tried Scrivener, but realised that everything it has, so do Pages, so I never stuck with it.
Of course LaTeX works on Macs. Just google. Of course, it's not really a word processor but a compiler. You have to like that sort of thing to like LaTeX. And it was primarily built to display mathematical formulas, which it still does better than anything else. But it's perfectly adequate for books. It has ligatures, can do all sorts of formatting, and the best thing is that it's really the software doing it all for you, you just lay down guidelines. It's also brilliant for experimentation. For example, my latest work originally had dialogues in two languages - original in the text and English translation as footnotres. I had set it up so that with a minor edit to the source file I could switch the two, which I did when I realised that English had to be in the text. I am probably going to go another step and banish the original language altogether, which will again take only a minor edit in the source file (rather than editing 100 pages of dialogue!). For me, that's what LaTeX gives you. Total control over the parts you WANT to control. I don't want to control line breaks, there are rules for those. LaTeX can handle it. I do want to control what format my chapters are going to be in, and then I want LaTeX to put each chapter in that format automatically. It does this, and it almost never does something you don't want (until you get to images, which it sometimes obstinately refuses to put on the page you want them because it feels it's more artistic if the image comes two pages later, but even then there are ways and means... ).
Well, LaTeX sounds tempting. I did actually google it before you posted your latest, and did discover that it's not primarily a wordprocessor, but can function as such. You're right, it has been around a long time. I might give it a go. Thanks for the pointer.
