Comments on: Five Word Processing Gems–Free and Nearly So

By: lilyhill

lilyhill — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 17:30:07 +0000

I’ve used Keynote, although moved on since that project was abandoned. Rough Type is very useful – the scratchpad is great for jotting notes that pop in stream-of-consciousness style. OpenOffice for creating and using templates and for writing manuals. For blog posts, I like ScribeFire, and for research writing I use Zotero (both of which have Firefox add-ons.).

By: Alex Corroborant

Alex Corroborant — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:49:25 +0000

Jarte 3 plus is a great productivity tool that does some things better than Word (like insertion of formatted special characters with key combos). It opens blazing fast. I keep task lists, project logs, ideas (universal capture) and other frequently accessed rtf files in the Jarte favorites folder where launchy can open them with a couple of keystrokes. Then sync between computers with a USB memory stick. Its a great program.

By: Samuel Dean

Samuel Dean — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:08:56 +0000

Tom, good tip on Page Four http://www.softwareforwriting.com/pagefour.html I’m definitely going to make use of that one.

Sam

By: Mike Carter

Mike Carter — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 16:16:12 +0000

I use Open Office & Sun Weblog Publisher to write my blog posts. Works for me!

By: Kenny Heimbuch

Kenny Heimbuch — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:28:53 +0000

There are some other good Windows-centric free word processors I have come across at xtort.net, and one in particular from that site called QJot. There is another cool fullscreen editor called Q10 and this gem called Jarte. Besides being free, all of the above seem to be portable too!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:18:39 +0000

I've always been a fan of LyX (http://www.lyx.org) for any kind of "structured" document writing. It takes all the typesetting expertise of LaTeX and presents it in a simple-to-use word processor. Type your document, tell LyX where your section headings, etc. are, and LyX takes care of all the formatting to make very professional-looking PDF's.

By: Becoming A Writer Seriously » Five Word Processing Tools

Becoming A Writer Seriously » Five Word Processing Tools — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:12:54 +0000

[...] Dean at Web Worker Daily shares in his post late yesterday recommendations about five word processing tools he often uses. Included are Abiword and OpenOffice, which I’ve covered before, but he also [...]

By: Tom Colvin

Tom Colvin — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:59:44 +0000

I keep a folder on my desktop with links to my Writing Tools. Inside are my three reliable and free word processing and note-taking workhorses: Keynote, Rough Draft and Page Four. Each has been given a full review with screenshots at my blog at http://www.becoming-a-writer-seriously.com

Thanks for your leads, three of which are new to me. I’ll check them out — and will also point my readers to your post.

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 08:00:16 +0000

Lotus Symphony (http://symphony.lotus.com/) becomes better and better every couple of months. It’s like OpenOffice, but with attention to usability.

By: Robert J.

Robert J. — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:31:20 +0000

Far be it for me to prop up a Microsoft program, but frankly, Live Writer is pretty awesome for blog editing and is FREE! Imports all the categories and whatnot from my WordPress blog so I can just go nuts inside the editor.