First off, I’m very strictly a PC user, but my writing buddy is a strictly Mac user, so I’ve heard of this program before and I was beyond ecstatic to see a beta for windows coming out. The bonus of the trial running through Nanowrimo is just a big plus.
However, there are a couple of things that are already driving me a little nuts. Keeping in mind I literally just downloaded the program, so given I may just be missing the step to get to how I like it, but after fiddling I can’t seem to figure it out, so here we are:
- The program does not recognize contractions such as: won’t, couldn’t, etc. outside of dialogue. And while I understand the rhetorical literary arguments against those words, having them pop up as misspellings all over my document just isn’t ok. I understand why it does that, however I am not a classical novelist, I’d like an option to turn it off, or an option that will highlight certain writing taboos when asked to, but otherwise ignore them. At the very least, for the misspelling correction options have “did not” in there. The programing took extra time and care, I’m pretty sure we both know I didn’t mean “Dido.”
-The formatting. The forum based paragraph styles with a mandatory space between paragraphs and no automatic indent is really throwing me through a loop. To me, I just don’t like it. This is just strait copy paste from my word document. I do see that indents can be added, but they’ don’t automatically arrive with that formatting despite being originally written that way, compiling the document shows no better result. In fact, compiling the document seems to have inserted random symbols in various places when compiled into a rich text format.
-Copy/paste when using comments. I have comments in my original document linked to words, however when I c/p it over, it just a mess. It’s nice that it bumps the linked info down to the bottom, but it modifies my text to blue links which I can’t seem to undo even after deleting the information. The “copy without annotations, etc.” option seems to have no effect. I do however like the ability to later link that info into my research folder, but the random text coloration that I can’t undo after it’s pasted without rewriting the section is annoying. Also it seems to transfer over when compiling the document, while the color isn’t as big of a deal, worrying about whether or not there will be randomly underlined words in my final product gets to me.
-Compiling, I may be missing something here, but when I compile it cuts off halfway through my second text document. Keeping in mind, I don’t have much of anything in the program at the moment, 3 text documents and 2 reference documents. If I’m missing an option I’d love to see it, I’ve tried several different compiling formats to no avail.
Anyway, that’s just my first impression of the program. I know it seems all rather negative, but it really all has great potential, and I understand that this is just a Beta release so no better way to suggest changes than here and now 