CopyWrite and NeoOffice
Have I blogged about CopyWrite before? I used to use it for all my novel writing. It is a neat piece of software that allows you to focus on your writing rather than the distractions of your desktop. Typically you turn it into full-screen mode, where all you see is your page, and your words in any font size; then just type away.
At any time you can return to the project mode. CopyWrite allows you to create as many documents in a project as you like, and assign them to different categories like chapters, background notes, research, outline, etc. That’s very useful. You can also attach notes to each document and the project as a whole, and have them available as a side drawer whilst you type – perfect for characters details that you don’t want to get wrong, or the outline of the scene you are writing. The only annoying thing is that you can’t take these notes into the full-screen mode.
The other interesting feature is the ability to version every document. Apparently this allows you to create alternate versions of a scene in a “single” document, and then flip between them by loading a different version. If nothing else, it serves as a history or backup of your work, although I never found this useful to me.
The main thing that put me off CopyWrite in the end was its formatting limitations and that it can’t export into anything else. It’s a closed system. Typically I need to print pages to take to my weekly writer’s group, and this meant cutting and pasting from CopyWrite into a proper word processor. I seem to recall that I couldn’t even do double-spacing in CopyWrite, so couldn’t just print from there. I certainly couldn’t do headers and footers.
So in the end I moved over to NeoOffice, for its powerful tools and industry standardization (Word). NeoOffice is basically a complete open-source and free replacement for Microsoft Office, and 95% compatible in my experience. The document mode outputs to Word in many flavours, windows or Mac, and the spreadsheet outputs to Excel format. I use both regularly. NeoOffice also saves in its native format which is the way to go, and then do an export when you need to share with others. I love NeoOffice: It is full-featured, stable, fast!, and they seem to update it monthly.
