

Let's Make Great Software For Writers, Together - moron4hire
http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/80162485841/lets-make-great-software-for-writers-together

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klez
Seems interesting.

For most kind of books (non-technical ones), I think a simple text editor
would suffice. Write in markdown (that's easy enough for non-technical writers
to grasp) and then convert to epub with pandoc or something similar.

Or was your idea different, like a full-fledged word processors that can
export to epub?

~~~
moron4hire
JWD is just a text editor. It is meant to be a platform for training people to
complete writing projects. The un-distracted writing format was a big win for
my friends. It was difficult to keep up with the project after NaNoWriMo
finished and my friends weren't writing anymore, emailing me all the time,
bugging me for updates :)

Some of the feedback I got early on was that some people really wanted to do
some basic formatting. I think what they really meant was that they wanted
basic organizing, the formatting was just how they knew how to do it. There is
no point in letting them choose fonts, for example, because once the book is
on the Kindle it will only be readable in a select few fonts, chosen by the
user, anyway. Simple interface. Get the writer to stop futzing around with
meaningless activity. Get them focused on writing.

I think the next "big win" in that respect would be to make the ePub package.
It should be dead-simple for a user to go from editor to saved document to
uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing. And they should have a reasonable
expectation of what that document will look like.

Semantic markup in the back end, a default style sheet on top of it, and yes,
perhaps a Markdown-style interface for the user.

------
bowerbird
i'm just about to release a whole ton of stuff...

one-click output to many formats, including .epub, from light-markup (zen
markup) ascii-text-files...

2-pane setup: supercharged textarea on one side, and nicely-formatted live
display on the other...

other apps cover the entire workflow, start to end.

i'd love pre-release feedback. bowerbird@aol.com

-bowerbird

