PC tools similar to Scrivener?
26 Jul 2009 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI know someone on my flist posted a review of a bunch of different writing tools, both PC and Mac, but now I can't recall who or where. Could the esteemed person who did so, please speak up? I'd like to be able to forward a few folks your way, to get that information for themselves. It looked pretty handy, but since I've got Scrivener now, I only kinda noted the info and moved along... naturally, since I only seem to do that when it's info I'll find useful later. (Go figure, eh.)
So, who was the brilliant person who posted the variety review?
So, who was the brilliant person who posted the variety review?
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Date: 26 Jul 2009 04:57 pm (UTC)Organized roughly in order of complexity....
Writer's Cafe: An all-in-one writing/organizing/storyboarding program. Quite complicated, imo. Free trial.
Liquid Story Binder: Another all-in-one. Many different ways to organize your info and stories. Could be quite pretty, but was in desperate need of being drag-and-drop-capable. 30-day free trial.
The Journal: I used this one for quite awhile. A nice, clean interface, some organizational capabilities (books, topics, etc.) 45-day free trial.
LifeJournal Also used this one for quite awhile. Its downside was that it didn't strike me as a product that was in development, so the little bugs I ran into didn't really have a good chance of getting fixed. Free trial.
yWriter: Freeware aimed at the chapter/scene organization of a novel, with separate organization for character and settings. Fairly feature-rich, though not the prettiest thing around. Freeware.
Evernote: A note-taking application more than writing software, so the actual formatting choices are limited, and getting things out of the notes with the same formatting might be annoying. But, it's a great and flexible program for organizing information. Free option.
TreeDBNotes Free: My current organizational software. Organizes into notebooks with heirarchical trees, nice search capability, a tags capability.... Simple, and free!
Papel: Interesting visual organization of files, backups. No real formatting choices, though. Nice if you write in .txt files. Free, but the publisher appears to be MIA, so not a developing project.
RoughDraft: RTF file writing program. Quite simple, more like a tabbed notepad than anything else, but has backup capabilities, some helps for inserting frequently-used phrases/words/names or symbols, notes to the side. No real internal organization of stories/chapters, though. Free. Unfortunately looks like it's not in active development.
PageFour: One of the simplest programs I've found. Full snapshot and automatic backups. Notebooks with one-tier hierarchies for organization. Nice internal search options. I mostly don't use this because it IS so simple and like RoughDraft. I'd like deeper heirarchies, some tag support, etc. It seems not QUITE worth the money, though maybe next update. Free trial. The Scrivener website insists that this is the closest to Scrivener on a PC, though frankly Scrivener seems to have tons more features.
EDIT:
Also!
Celtx: A plethora of organization here, though this software seems to be aimed towards screenplays more than novels. Still, it has some nice features if you can ignore the stuff you don't want.
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Date: 26 Jul 2009 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Jul 2009 08:41 pm (UTC)Another one I found (I never need much impetus to look around and see what software I might have missed): SuperNotecard. Leans towards the organizational/outlining end of the spectrum, but I don't see why you couldn't use it for actual writing, too. The "cards" seem like they can handle large chunks of text, and it has very basic formatting. Categories, "factors" (could be tags, characters, whatever), lots of hierarchical organizy goodness. I'm tempted to play with this one now....
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Date: 28 Jul 2009 05:08 am (UTC)