Saturday, February 7, 2009

New Mac makes editing Book really easy

Well, I sprang for a new mac, mostly because of a cool writing tool known as 'scrivner'. It basically allows a completely non-sequenial person like me to write.

I am currently writing a gluten free reciepe book, and dreaded the thought of having to take all 85 of my reciepes and get them into a single file.

Well, scrivner let me avoid doing that. I took the html files, opened them in firefox, selected the text, and dropped into scrivner. It automatically created the new titles for me, and put the text into the body of the document.

What makes scrivner so different is that you don't edit a whole document. You chop it into little bits, and then put those bits together (at the end) once you decide on structure etc. I can drag and drop 'index cards' or chapters within the text, not having to bother with the stupid word tricks etc.

Anyway, it is a MUCH cooler process than just word processing. It also allows me to take 'snapshots' prior to doing some major editing, rather live cvs, or git. I can 'roll' back to previous versions. Very nice feature. The price is also right: $39.00.

No comments: