As someone who is a Doctorate student Idea Mason is very focused on academic writing and quite helpful for the scholar who needs to build their dissertation or manual. For example, I have been using this application for the past six months and it has given me a better appreciation of what post-graduate students experience when building these sort of documents. I was intimidated with it at first but once I started getting a better feel for how it worked I learned there were things I was able to do that I could not do with freeware or some of the commercial brands and that to me was priceless.

My time is very limited however this is an issue that I would like to keep open as I feel more persons need to be aware of it. I just discovered that Idea Mason is closing their doors due to economy which I think is sad to hear. No one wants to close a business they have worked so hard to build and maintain. I do have to wonder if there is a way the company can be kept open as they are bringing a great thing to education and the academic world. That’s just my thought. Thanks so much for discussing this issue as I feel it is important for everyone to know how great this application does work.”

All of our readers would like to know what you think of it.  Leave a comment.

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• Character Keeper: Free Note-taking Software for Writers (writerstechnology.com)

ZDnet is one of the most influential of sites about computers, software and freeware.  Today it posted a list of the top 25 free aplications, as suggested by its readers.  In my view, it’s the best such list I’ve ever seen.  I know almost all of the applications myself, have them installed on my own computer and can vouch for all of them.  But the biggest surprise to me was the appearance of the free multi-platform word processor AbiWord.

If you need a capable word processor without the huge investment required to purchase Microsoft Word, AbiWord is certainly a prime candidate.  True, it can’t do everything that Word can.  But most writers don’t need the complexity of Word.  This may just be the time to take AbiWord for a spin.

If the application appeals to you, be certain to check out the Plug-in Matrix page.  AbiWord supports quite a number of plug-ins that extend its functionality.  Basically there are two packs of plbug-in’s.  One deals with import and export of various file formats.  I was surprised to discover some unusual and potentially very useful import options that even Word doesn’t have.  More important is the Tools pack, with some very handy options.  One that especially caaught my eye, as a sight-impaired writer, is the text-to-speech option that will allow one to hear what you type without resorting to an external application.

By the way, some of the article links below are very informative too.

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• 5 free alternatives to Word on Mac (en.onsoftware.com)
• AbiWord v2.7.2 (lockergnome.com)
• Review: Mellel 2.6 (macworld.com)
• How To Open, Edit and Print any Text Document File (makeuseof.com)
• Corel Home Office for Netbooks (ubergizmo.com)
• Pogue’s Productivity Secrets Revealed (nytimes.com)

Here are some comments from Bits du Jour regulars who have been using the software for months:

I’ve had and used this program daily for more than a year now, and I wouldn’t be without it. First program I install on any new computer I get. Beyond a simple journal, it is a program for writing, plain and simple. Plus you can compose your blog entries in The Journal and post them directly to your blog from it. An excellent writing application that I highly recommend!  — from Jim McGowan.

More than just a journal program, I’d call it a whole life file cabinet and organizer. Besides being a program to keep a daily diary or journal, I have it organized to keep quotes, stories, genealogy information, photography ideas, and a collection of favorite poems. Very, very versatile.  — from M. Saunders.

If you are at all intrigued, I suggest to visit the software’s homepage, which provides a lot of very useful and clear information.  I can see that this program might be very useful to a lot of writers.  Particularly intriguing is the ability to keep “loose-leaf,” undated pages in a hierarchical tree of nested pages — ideal for your writing projects, more or less replacing your word processor until you need more formatting power.

The Journal

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• Diary.com

I descirbed my first impressions about IdeaMason before, when it was previously offered by Bits du Jour last May.  Read my review.

It’s not the easiest program to master.  In fact, I’m still struggling with it myself.  But it’s power is so enticing that I’m still intrigued — enough so that I’m downloading a second copy for my newly purchased desktop computer in Manila.  This machine has a 22-inch screen, a big plus for IdeaMason, which operates with multiple windows open simultaneously.

As it happens, I’ve also installed Microsoft Office 2007 on this computer and am finally encountering the much-discussed “ribbon.”  I don’t yet know quite what to make of it myself.  Some users love it; others despise it.  On Thursday, Bits du Jour will offer a huge discount on a pair of programs that will replace the ribbon with the classic Word and Excel menu structure from Office 2003.  If you hate the ribbon, here’s your chance to ditch it!.

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Atlantis Word Processor 1.6.1.9
www.atlantiswordprocessor.com
$35 as of 11 September 2008

By JR, Guest Columnist: Always on the lookout for my ideal word processor for Microsoft Windows, I investigate any promising word processors that I read or hear about. My ideal word processor would resemble an updated and slightly enhanced Windows-compatible descendant of the ancient (early 1990s) Mac application WriteNow (by T/Maker) — a model of convenience and user friendliness, and, I dare say, the only computer application that I’ve ever loved. WriteNow was lightning quick and efficient and had all the features I needed back in the day — and those features were incredibly easy and convenient to access and employ, including the most intuitive and powerful implementation of stylesheets the word-processing world has ever known. WriteNow was as organic and elegant and intuitive as Microsoft Word is not. WriteNow was purely a word processor, however, with no graphics capabilities aside from being able to insert graphics as in-line text. Atlantis Word Processor is something of a modern-day WriteNow in terms of features, but it’s saddled with a more familiar and conventional (Word-like) but less elegant and efficient user interface.

Atlantis is based on the Rich Text Format (RTF) format. While that inherently restricts Atlantis’s capabilities in many ways, it does make Atlantis somewhat universal: most word processors are RTF-compatible to at least some degree and can handle most things that Atlantis spits out. Paragraph and character formatting are almost always maintained, but advanced formatting (footnotes, columns, page numbering, stylesheets, etc.) may or may not be maintained depending on just how RTF-compatible the other word processor happens to be. It’s been my experience that Microsoft Word and Lotus Word Pro have few if any problems with heavily formatted Atlantis RTF documents; WordPerfect, on the other hand, has trouble with even the simplest RTF documents, even those generated by WordPad. Atlantis can also save documents in Word’s DOC format, so that might be the way to go in cases when you want to make sure that fancy formatting is kept intact — though, of course, the target word processor must have good Word compatibility in those cases. Most word processors can create and save documents in the RTF format, but Atlantis seems to do a particularly good job of it. (Word and Word Pro do a good job as well, but WordPerfect sucks at RTF.)

Atlantis has a clean, straightforward user interface, and its toolbars, menus, and hot keys are very customizable. Most of the button icons are intuitive and easy to figure out, but the ones associated styles and stylesheets never fail to confuse me — I have to keep the balloon help on to help me identify them. Organizational features such as bookmarks, sections, stylesheets, list, etc., can also be accessed via a Control Board panel to the left of the main widow. I wish the Control Board included a mini file manager for convenient access to documents, but it doesn’t.

Advanced formatting/properties are changed via the usual dialog boxes that will be familiar to users of Word and Works and most other modern word processors. (Here I would have much preferred something along the lines of Word Pro’s uniquely efficient InfoBox, an all-in-one dialog box that allows you to change the formatting/properties of pretty much anything in the document without having to open and close a series of separate dialog boxes; the InfoBox can be left open while you select text or paragraphs at your convenience.) Paragraph stylesheets operate in the usual way, similar to Word’s, but they are nowhere near as intuitive and powerful as WriteNow’s — why all word processors haven’t adopted/stolen WriteNow’s great implementation of stylesheets is beyond me. Disappointingly, Atlantis has no character stylesheets. (I use paragraph stylesheets routinely, so they’re very important to me. I use character stylesheets only occasionally, so their absence here isn’t a deal-breaker, but it does make me sigh.)

Atlantis has all the features of a good mid-level word processor and some of the features of an advanced word processor: table of contents, header/footers, footnotes/endnotes, variable columns, sections, paragraph stylesheets (but no character stylesheets), etc. It does not, however, offer index creation, a glossary, mathematical formulas, true outlining (it has outlining via paragraph stylesheets), tables, text boxes, drawing/painting, or graphics (except for the insertion of graphics in-line).

The Spellchecker and AutoCorrect are very good and very customizable, though Spellcheck As-You-Type does slow the program slightly. There’s no built-in thesaurus, but WordWeb (a popular freeware dictionary/thesaurus) can be integrated into the menu system. There’s no grammar-correction feature, but AutoCorrect can check for many common types of typos. Atlantis has too many little conveniences and odd little features to mention here, but many of them are quite useful. Atlantis has proven to be stable with fairly complex documents up to 75 pages in length, the longest I’ve written with it. Weighing in at less than 4MB, Atlantis is a quick download and is easy to install and test. It’s also portable and can be installed directly to or transferred to a memory flash drive. There’s a U3-smart version, but I have no experience with that.

Despite its shortcomings, Atlantis is probably the most convenient and least troublesome of current mid-range word processors that I’ve used, and it’s the best RTF word processor that I’ve come across. Its lack of fancy graphics capabilities and advanced scientific/technical writing tools will immediately eliminate it from consideration for many writers, as will its $35 price tag, but old-school wordsmiths looking for a pure, unadulterated word processor that’s light on its feet and easy to use might want to give it a try. I’m still waiting for the Second Coming of WriteNow, but Atlantis is a good stopgap. By JR, Guest Columnist

• TOM’S COMMENT: My dream for this blog-website is to gather in one place original reviews and links to external reviews of every conceivable writing tool available today — an online reference, if you will, to assist the inquiring writer find tools that will increase one’s productivity. If anyone else has personal experience with a tool that they would be willing to review, indicate your interest in the comments section of this post.

The first in the series, an overview of Linux, came out in early July. The second in the series, Notetaking in Linux, is now also online. The blogger also promises coverage of word processing and maybe more. I’m intrigued.

I’ll be following this series, and you may wish to do so too.

This year the review is written by WD Contributing Editor Jenna Glatzer.  She’s certainly done her homework.  Out of 39 products reviewed,  twenty-three are new to me.  Twenty-three!  And I make it my business to track down such software programs.  On the other hand, only nine of them are freeware, which is more of my focus, since I never receive evaluation copies from program developers.  Out of curiosity, I got out my calculator and discovered I would have to pay $1590.55 to buy them all, not counting shipping costs.  The commercial packages cost from $19.95 to $299.95.

Equally surprising to me are the omissions.  Virtually none of the programs I actually use are listed.  And I have on my computer only six from the WD list.

General word processors are not included.  But the article does review a number, though by no means all, of the word processors developed especially for writers.

With all those observations registered, the article still is extremely valuable.  Each software gets a paragraph or two, identifying its focus and where it fits into the market.  I especially like the tear-out, single-sheet chart listing all the of programs, along with their websites, price, operating system and capability.  The chart is divided into three sections:  general writing, fiction and scriptwriting.  Some of the programs assist with story and character development, plotting and structure.  The scriptwriting programs tilt toward formatting assistance, some with story development aids tossed in.  Therer are grammar and style checkers.  On the business side, the review identifies several submissions trackers, as well as bacoup programs.

Here’s the SoftMaker information — hey, and thanks to forwarding it so promptly:

Tom:

First of all, thank you very much for your review of TextMaker at http://becoming-a-writer-seriously.com/2008/05/14/textmaker-why-it-excites-me/ — your support is much appreciated.

You mentioned a couple of things in that article on which I’d like to comment:

- Hyphenation can be switched off. It’s a paragraph attribute, so it’s in Format/Paragraph. To switch it off for the whole document, edit the paragraph style “Normal” with Format/Paragraph Style and set hyphenation there to “None”. To switch it off everywhere, make that change to your document template (normally Normal.tmv).

In principle, this is the same method as for changing your default font described here: http://softmaker.com/english/tipstm_en.htm

- Endnotes are available. The only limitation, if you will, is that a document may contain _either_ footnotes _or_ endnotes. To switch, go to Insert/Footnote/Options, set the position, OK, Close.

- The installer indeed doesn’t put application icons on the desktop, but it does install SMASH, our little system tray utility that makes starting the apps just as quick — and the tray will not be covered by other application windows.

Let me know if you need to know anything else about SoftMaker Office and, again, thank you for your support.

Best regards,

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

First, some background. The software was first introduced way back in 1987 by a German company named SoftMaker. Over the years, the software has been continuously developed and upgraded, and it is now integrated into SoftMaker Office 2008, which also includes spreadsheet and presentation components.

To confuse matters, the company works with resellers, who can offer the software under their own brands. I actually first came across the software packaged as Ashampoo Office 2008. Currently, Ashampoo, which is a very aggressive reseller, is offering the office suite at a deep discount, if you know where to look for it: $29.95, rather than its usual price of $59.95. [SoftMaker, of course, offers it too, at $79.95, but with an additional component which will appeal to software techies.] I’m rushing this post onto the blog in hopes that you can catch the discount [details at the end of the post] before it is discontinued.

Why am I so excited about this word processor? First, it has developed a reputation in Europe as the product most compatible with Microsoft Word. In fact, at installation, one can associate one’s .doc, .rtf and .txt files with TextMaker: click on a .doc file and it will open within TextMaker. Microsoft Word, even if on your computer, can just quietly sink into the background. I have found numerous comments by users who report absolutely no problems with opening and saving .doc files, even very complex ones. In addition, it handles OpenOffice files equally well.

More important is the very clean interface. Anyone familiar with Microsoft Word will feel immediately at home. But to my eyes, the interface is much less cluttered. As with Word, one can set the page view in several different ways. I like it best with text running from side to side, yielding larger-than-life type size that’s very easy to read.

Most important, of course, are the capabilities of TextMaker.

Word Handling

TextMaker apparently is known in Germany for its particularly capable spell checker, which can be set up to handle any one of the major Western languages. It can alert you with a beep whenever you misspell something — or you can ask instead for red underlining of misspelled words. The program automatically hyphenates words at the end of lines. [I’m not sure one can switch this off. I haven’t yet found a way to do that.] You can instruct the program to automatically capitalize the first letter of every sentence. It can also be set to catch and correct those occasional DOuble capital letters that sometimes occur when typing quickly. Built in is a capable thesaurus — and even a language translator. Particularly useful for my work is the drop-down box with special characters, making it easy to insert foreign language accent marks.

Templates and Design

It’s easy to set up document templates. Particularly useful is a “first-page” template, which will format the first page of a letter, say with your logo at the top and address at the bottom, or perhaps the first page of a book chapter, with following pages in standard format. The software includes a “Word Art” capability, a feature I used to enjoy in Microsoft Publisher some years back. One can also create rather elaborate document designs — for newsletters, for example. I’ve read that even drop-down initial paragraph caps are possible. And, VERY IMPORTANT, the design can be locked into place by saving the document as a PDF file! This is an important capability that writers are beginning to discover. This capability is available in Microsoft Word 2007, but here is available in a more Word 2003-type environment.

Bullets, Tables and Object-Handling

Like any full-fledged word processor, bullets and numbered lists are a snap. Tables can be composed within the software — or imported from the Office Suite spreadsheet. According to other user evaluations I’ve read at DonationCoder, the program also handles embedded graphics and photographs in a manner far-superior to Word. Anyone who has tried inserting numerous photographs into a Word documents knows how dicey the formatting can be. Users report that TextMaker handles dozens and dozens of inserted photos and graphics with no problems whatsoever.

Other features

TextMaker can track document revisions and insert non-printable comments. It handles footnotes [but not endnotes, apparently -- a flaw for me] and builds bibliographies. It will construct a Table of Contents and Index. It offers an outline function, which some software junkes at the DonationCoder forum suggest is more stable than the outliner in Word. My own experience with Word’s outline function when building a major book draft frightened me away from ever using that capability in Word again. An internal database will keep track of an address book to facilitate mailings lists — and it has a special capability to type addresses on envelops.

And, as a final significant feature, the entire office suite installs on a USB memory stick. That means you can easily carry it with you, and you can plug it in to any PC with a USB port, all without fear of leaving behind any traces of your work or presence on the host computer. You will find USB installation instructions rather hidden away in the SoftMaker support area under Tips and Tricks. These instructions suggest that the outlined USB routine will keep your desktop version completely synced up with your USB version, though I’ll want to test this out. If that’s true, this software is a true winner for me. [By the way, I'll be writing several upcoming posts about the usefulness of the USB option. Stay tuned.]

And, by the way, at the SoftMaker site, one can obtain software versions for Linus, Pocket PC’s and Windows CE.

WOW!!! Perhaps now you will understand my excitement, especially with its discounted price and seamless compatibility with Word.

While the best price will be found via Ashampoo, that reseller offers no documentation at all. To learn more about the software, to read a full product brochure, to download a user’s manual, go to the SoftMaker website. [SoftMaker does offer especial academic pricing -- so students and professors may prefer to purchase the product direct from the developer.] Writers who are really serious about this software may choose to buy it direct from the developer, even without a discount. That will provide access to periodic product updates — in fact, there’s already an update “service pack” available. I’m considering this option myself. By the way, SoftMaker offers a 30-day trial version [though exporting doc and rtf files can only be done during the first seven days]. The developer also maintains an email newsletter, which may send out occasional alerts to price discounts, as well as an active online forum where one can ask questions and do trouble-shooting.

To find the special discount at Ashampoo, go to the homepage and click on the “Service Letter” tab. Scroll down the list to find the Ashampoo Office 2003 discount announcement. I’m not sure just how long the discount will be available. I found the download link from the announcement to be problematic. If you have trouble with a corrupted download file, just download it from the software’s own product page.

I did notice one peculiarity during installation. I was not asked about adding an icon to the desktop — and none appeared there. I had to launch the program from the Ashampoo folder under PROGRAMS.