Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Word processor for e-text (updated)

Somebody pointed out in an article that word processors are an endangered species because they were designed for print. I hadn't thought of that, but that immediately gave me the idea; hey, isn't it time we got a Word Processor which is from the bottom up designed for e-text? Something for writing, which will give you the formatting options you need for blogs, twitter, web articles, and of course ebooks!
I would love that. I almost never write for the page anymore. It would be especially good if the thing would have the power (though it would not be easy to make) to export to multiple ebook and other formats, ePub, Kindle, and whatnot.

UPDATEs:
Will recommended Scrivener, which I have heard many good things about as a very powerful and flexible tool.

Anon said:
Not sure what you are after but, how does Apple's "Pages.app" do what you want to accomplish? It too was probably designed for print but since it's WYSIWYG isn't it suitable for e-publication as well?

Yes, actually Pages sounds like a good thing. I know that it produces ePub files which are good enough that Take Control Books use the app, and that's a strong recommendation since they do technical books (tables, links, etc) and are quite demanding.

But notice it's called "Pages"...
I was thinking a bit abstractly, rather than looking for an app for a specific purpose. Sort of wondering, when will apps start to loose the anchoring in paper and pages and fully embrace the rapidly growing age of digital publication, where printing on paper is not the first use but a rather specialized one if it's done at all.

4 comments:

Will Duquette said...

Take a look at Scrivener.

craniac said...

Exporting to the different formats shouldn't be a problem as Calibre (which I think is open source) already does that.

Anonymous said...

Not sure what you are after but, how does Apple's "Pages.app" do what you want to accomplish? It too was probably designed for print but since it's WYSIWYG isn't it suitable for e-publication as well?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thanks guys.

Yes, actually Pages sounds like a good thing. I know that it produces ePub files which are good enough that Take Control Books use the app, and that's a strong recommendation since they do technical books and are quite demanding.

But notice it's called "Pages"...
I was thinking a bit abstractly, rather than looking for an app for a specific purpose. Sort of wondering, when will apps start to loose the anchoring in paper/pages ideas?