[...] read one of his earlier articles, In Praise of Rich Text Format – The Universal Format for Writers, and started thinking about how I archive my stories on my laptop. I didn’t do anything about [...]

[...] However, I am surprised that there are significant omissions, those programs aimed more at creative writers and journalists. As I too have been steadily working my way through this same arena, with several major reviews already posted on this blog, I have some observations and comments about the review, from my perspective. Reviewer and self-professed “software nut” Zaine Ridling, who maintains The Great Software List, begins at just the right point: all writers are not the same, and word processors tend to fit some writers better than others. It’s a good idea to do some exploration to find the most productive tool for your own style of writing. In fact, one might end up using several word processors, each with strengths for particular writing tasks. Then Zaine takes up the next most important question: what format is best for writers.  At this point, his decided bias as a “software nut” shines through. He declares firmly for the emerging Open Document Format. Over the long haul, he’s probably correct. Yet even he recognizes Microsoft’s continuing role as bottleneck to interoperability, even in its latest incarnation Word 2007. Meanwhile, the Rich Text Format [see my comments about RTF] performs well for non-technical writers and is easy to share. It happens to be the format adopted by the word processors Zaine has left off his list. [...]

[...] PageFour maintains its files in Rich Text Format, or RTF, the format which I think should be preferred by writers [for explanation, see this post]. Each notebook, folder and page is saved as a separate entity, rather than pulling an entire major work into a single file. Beginning in version 1.60, pages can be easily merged for printing out an entire manuscript for hard-copy submission. [...]