
Neo – Desired Word Processor for Authors - ilamont
http://www.hughhowey.com/neo-a-word-processor-for-authors/
======
cstross
(Wearing my jobbing-novelist hat here ...)

He kinda lost me at the idea of navigating a WIP using page thumbnails on the
left. (a) That's so 1988 (Clive Sinclair, I'm thinking of you and your
Pipedream here), and (b) _the page is not the appropriate document element for
navigation_ — scenes can be as short as a sentence or almost as long as a
chapter, and _scenes_ are how I structure prose fiction. Indeed, a manuscript
page bears no real relationship to a published paper book page, or an ebook
equivalent.

Finally, as functional requirements go this is, shall we say, less than ideal:
but let's not go there.

~~~
bobsil1
Totally agree.

Check out Granthika, a semantic novel editor with automatic error checking for
timeline and character errors: [http://granthika.co](http://granthika.co)

In progress, pre-beta, by a friend and novelist.

~~~
oever
> a completely unprecedented, patent-pending technology

I'm all for innovation which is why I stopped reading here.

~~~
mmirate
Agreed; "patented" or "patent-pending" is better read as "immediately stop
reading this, cast the entire concept out of your mind, and don't ever think
about this general problem-domain again, or we might be able to sue you or
your employer if you compete with us by inventing exactly the 'wrong'
algorithm/concept/thing/etc. And _certainly_ avoid reading our patent, or we
can definitely sue you for competing with us.".

------
ilaksh
The interesting thing to me about this as a programmer is that it really looks
like a spec.

There may be even bored programmers who read this on HN and have already
started building it.

It would be interesting to see how many changes were made to that spec by the
end of the development process.

The trickiest part to me is the idea that regardless of what computer you put
the USB stick in, it just immediately loads the program. Can you even really
be sure that will happen if you restrict it to the last few versions of
Windows?

So that right there is one of the most challenging aspects of software
development -- when a big part of the concept is something that either isn't
actually feasible as stated or you are not sure is possible. Which is really
common because most projects are not driven by programmers but by non-
technical people.

What it seems like most programmers will do is to try to find a clever way to
gloss-over this 'little detail' about how they don't know how to be sure that
a program will immediately open with no effort once the USB stick is inserted.
The issue with that is, if they leave it a little ambiguous, and then it turns
out that whoops, it never opens on his Macbook or requires him to manually
launch it.. then his super-easy program is not nearly as simple as he
imagined.. if the instant launch was a big part of it. Then the average
programmer would just say "well, I told you I wasn't super sure that it would
work exactly as you liked" \-- when really he barely mentioned it and the guy
didn't believe him.

Maybe some programmers are good at handling this -- I think you really need to
find a slick way to convince the guy that he never really needed or wanted
that instant open USB thing, or that having to double click after it was
inserted is exactly the same. Kind of about psychology as much as anything.

~~~
empath75
> The trickiest part to me is the idea that regardless of what computer you
> put the USB stick in, it just immediately loads the program. Can you even
> really be sure that will happen if you restrict it to the last few versions
> of Windows?

It's a textbook example of an x-y problem. He wants to be able to work
anywhere. He thinks the right way to do that is a USB drive. The _actual_
right way to do it is as a web app.

~~~
gwbas1c
But he wants the application to disable the internet! It's more an example of
a customer needing guidance from a professional. In this case, part of
deciding if this is a good project to work on is explaining the tradeoffs and
seeing how the customer navigates them. If the customer really wants to "have
his cake and eat it too," then walk away!

If you tell the customer, "computers don't automatically run applications on
USB sticks because then they would get hacked," and the customer doesn't
understand, then run away!

Otherwise, this is a situation where the customer needs to understand the
tradeoffs among a web application, desktop application, and tablet
application. If a desktop application is preferred, then there are very
significant tradeoffs with applications that can run off of USB sticks, versus
tiny installers that will only run on a recent version of Windows, versus an
installer that will work on Windows XP.

This is also a situation where a statement like, "an application that runs off
of a USB stick is very challenging, and is limited on what it can run on. This
would be a major distraction. Can we limit this to Windows 7 and Windows 10
with recent updates? Otherwise, we can put an installer on a USB stick, but it
might be very large in order to support older windows without updates. Would a
web-based application be better? You can run them in full-screen mode."

------
tincholio
95% of what he wants can be done with a suitable Emacs config, org-mode and
some elisp... What I find confusing, coming from a professional writer (though
maybe that's the eye with which they would look at this), is that he seems to
view very different aspects (purely cosmetic ones, such as the indented line
in a first paragraph, or heavily usability-oriented ones, inserting a TODO
note) as equally important.

Then again, he has tried all of the editors out there, and I'm just an Emacs
geek :)

~~~
aidenn0
95% of any program can be done with a suitable emacs config, org-mode and some
elisp. And then nobody will use it because it's emacs.

~~~
bittermang
The parent comment reminds me of a recent "every Stackoverflow question" post
which I cannot locate right now.

Yeah, you could emacs, or whatever. Or a regular human person could just use
this app and really enjoy the User Experience out of the box without any fuss.

------
cdiamand
I recently surveyed a writer about their software woes.

Response:

"I am a writer - fiction and non-fiction.

I haven't found good software to keep my notes, sentences, ideas, etc. in a
way that helps me easily incorporate them into the project I am working on.

Oftentimes, I will come up with a sentence or a paragraph that I want to put
in my story at a later time. It's just a moment - an idea- that comes up that
I want to save for later use. Well, guess what, these ideas start piling up
and I could have a huge pile of sentences/paragraphs that I will use to build
my story. But hey, I don't know just yet where I want to place them to tell
the most effective story.

I want a section in the particular file I am working on where I can keep these
ideas instead of having a whole separate "ideas" file or worse, scribbled on a
paper napkin.

I'd like to be able to easily drag and drop that paragraph/sentence from my
ideas section right into my story without having to do the annoying cut and
paste or worse, figuring out what file I saved that great sentence in.

I'd pay $130+ for it."

~~~
empath75
scrivener?

~~~
leggomylibro
Hm, looks interesting, but is there anything similar available for Linux?

I use a small chromebook as a primary workstation for its light form factor
and ARM's low power usage/long battery life. So if it's Mac/Windows or closed
source without an ARM binary, I can't use it.

------
weeksie
For me the most important part of writing longer, novel-length pieces is the
organization help that Scrivener gives me. So far it's my favorite tool and as
cool as this might be I'll remain skeptical until I see the final product.

~~~
antjanus
One downside of Scrivener is how old UI feels and looks. It definitely needs a
heavy facelift after all these years. Oh and the use of RTF docs.

I'd say that when someone comes to the table with markdown support, a UI that
matches the times, a better format, and strap Pandoc on top of it, you'd see a
true competitor to Scrivener.

Scrivener satisfies the market but I think a straight up clone with a few
changes and a few extra features could easily take over. Not one of these
alternatives that keep trying out something "new".

~~~
dangoor
Scrivener is actually getting a facelift. Check out their blog with some
screenshots of their in-progress Scrivener 3:

[https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/](https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/)

------
roryisok
My main personal project is a writing app, every time I see something like
this on HN I get a little heart flutter which is about 50% somebody stealing
my chance at greatness and 50% "oh cool, a new app to try out!"

I'm genuinely delighted to see authors stepping into the app production space.
I'm surprised more don't do it. I expected Charlie Stross to have his own
flavour of Linux by now.

I hope Hugh can pull this off.

Edit: forgot shameless plug: [http://getpoe.com](http://getpoe.com), Windows
8/10 only at the mo, sorry.

~~~
bittermang
"Windows 8/10 only at the mo, sorry."

Well... why? I get, like, macOS requiring a Mac for Xcode to ship an .app
bundle. But wha'bout that Linux?

~~~
roryisok
Excellent question.

Poe was created because back in 2012 when I upgraded to Windows 8, there were
no distraction free / focus writing apps in the store, and none of the
existing ones (like the stupendous writemonkey) had a fullscreen mode that
would play nice with Windows 8's app switching. This wasn't any fault of the
developers of those apps - MS gave switching priority to 'metro' apps, so
anything that was win32/64 was a second-citizen (of course this changed with
10, but at the time they were committed). I was learning how to write store
apps, I wanted a writing app on my surface. I saw an opening, and I took it.
Everything I've done since has been built upon that first app.

Fast forward five years and I have lots of users who like the app (40k or
something), but all my code is JS, built upon the Windows UWP/JS stack. It's
what I know best.

I really do want to build an app for Linux, and for macOS. I have bad days
where I'm totally put off, because there are some _fantastic_ writing apps out
there already that do so much more than Poe can (FocusWriter, for example,
does everything Poe does and is already cross-platform, and has features that
I can only dream of).

But on _good_ days, I feel like maybe having a choice of apps is a good thing,
and maybe there are things about Poe that people like over other apps, and
maybe the good people of linux and macOS might actually use it. On those good
days, I continue my work on porting to Electron as a cross-platform MVP. I
know some people won't like that, but I am time limited, as I pointed out in
another comment. This is the only way I'll have time to do it short of
quitting my full-time job, abandoning my in-progress novels and selling my
family on ebay.

------
pmbailey
Slightly off-topic, but I'd like to recommend the Silo Series also by the
author of this blog post. They're perhaps not life-altering in content, but
enjoyable sci-fi reads, nonetheless.

~~~
SwellJoe
Howey is perhaps my favorite new(ish) sci-fi author. His novels are almost
always page turners, even if they aren't always deep. _Wool_ (book one of the
Silo series) was my introduction to Howey, and also among his best. I also
recommend it for anyone that likes post-apocalyptic sci fi. _Sand_ is good,
too.

------
dsun180
I think the naming is counterproductive. How many things exist that are called
"NEO" these days?

~~~
knodi123
I know that was a rhetorical question, but a search for neo on github yields
14 _thousand_ results. Granted, that includes some "neon", but sheesh. It's
like that truck I saw the other day, for a business called "best carpet
cleaners". I get that the branding is cool, but you can't google that name.

Heck, there are several different programs named neo on the first page of
google search results for "neo editor"!

~~~
JRITSRob
Finding the balance between searchable and memorable is quite the task. A text
editor named Flugurbenhurg is gonna be relatively Google friendly, not quite
so grey matter friendly.

I've often had the itch to create tooling to automate tasks. Later deciding to
make it more generic and open source it. I have such a time trying to give
them names. Internal tooling, fine, just name it what it does and move on.
Public releases though... Oy, I'm sweating just thinking about it.

~~~
bittermang
"Finding the balance between searchable and memorable is quite the task."

While I agree, the name Neo is crap, unfortunately.

It's like how many things are named Fuse or Fusion in open source, or new
projects that start up with names that are clearly already dominated by
something else. It just doesn't work, doesn't do anyone any good in the long
run.

It's worth it to go back to the drawing board for a minute, and just come up
with a name. Especially since so much thought and care has gone in to the rest
of the app so far. Calling it Neo works like an internal project name, just to
fill in the blank and get something started. But as a name that can ship, Neo
is never going to work.

Unless it does, and becomes the new defacto Neo. Which could happen. But it's
a pipe dream. I think it's better to start off on the right foot with a good
name.

------
stepvhen
i write passable poems using ed; it doesn't get more distraction free than
that.

i understand the drive to flatten out the learning curve of software for non-
software-people. most of these options could be covered quickly with an author
oriented LaTeX frontend, and i venture to guess that would be easier to
develop. It already has an entire document class for books, covering
frontmatter, mainmatter, backmatter, chapters, table of contents, headers
footers, bibliography, etc. all that is needed is a author friendly GUI. file
management, tabs, etc would then be the main part of the NEO ecosystem. One
just has to supplement with templates and never mess with actual document
creation.

~~~
abricot
Yes, LaTeX is near-perfect for print, but pretty much useless for ebook
formats.

------
_pmf_
> The main focus, however, is perfect ebook files. Complying with Amazon’s
> standards will be a huge goal

I've bought Kindle books from Amazon that had 5 OCR errors per page.

~~~
robin_reala
The quality of paid ebooks is generally atrocious. Mind you, I usually submit
3-7 fixes per Gutenberg text I read so maybe I’m just overly picky…

------
thanatropism
What's a pantser and a plotter?

Wild guess: pantser novelists are more descriptive (a lot of ink spilled on
clothing) while plotters have much more characters and intrigue?

I keep trying to write something using composites of people I know as
characters, but this ensures I don't get details as hair color right.

~~~
ColinWright
Sorry if this is going to sound seriously "Grumpy Old Man", but I just typed
(well, copy/paste) exactly your question into Google and got the answer in an
instant.

So this is a genuine question - why did you ask this here instead of doing a
search? You typed your question and random speculation into the comment/reply
box, while you could just as easily - even more easily - typed your question
into the search box.

So there must be a reason - why not do the search?

~~~
mynameismonkey
Because as the other answers to the question show, sometimes there's more to
be gleaned from a human interaction than a straight fact-finding trip to the
Internet.

Or, sometimes, people just want to interact with a human. You know, converse.
We're a peer group, right? We're here to discuss things. Op is discussing. If
the entire group deemed it too obvious a question to merit replying, no-one
would have replied.

Further, this question and answer is now available to Google to crawl, store,
and return for future searchers. How did Google get all the answers that are
available in the first place? Someone typed a question, and someone else
answered it.

Finally, I Googled _your_ question and came up with this answer:

"Because receiving a personalized response is far more gratifying than reading
a Wikipedia page. It makes you feel at the very least a connection to another
human being which other than " leaving a footprint " is mans greatest desire
in life."

~~~
thanatropism
No, no, no.

Basic web searches note the expression "write by the seat of your pants",
which in turn is inspired by "fly by the seat of your pants". That's a
completely mystifying expression to me.

On the other hand, your answer is an impressive feat of projection: the
armchair psychology you invoke to explain why someone would do something you
don't understand at first is _clearly_ an explanation for why you would choose
to type out an off-topic demonstration of _your_ grasp of basic internet
skills.

It must be, following your sample of psychological theory, really satisfying
to plant some kind of flag saying "I know how to Google". In a forum called
"Hacker News" no less.

I know it's pleasant to feel superior to other people, but this particular
claim-to-superiority is both incredibly low-(intellectual)-effort and trying-
too-hard. That's not s good look on anyone.

------
X86BSD
I use Lyx to write, well, almost everything honestly. It was made for writing
imo. Leaving all the time wasting details for the core processor not for the
author to stress over. It just lets you focus on simply writing the content.

~~~
npsimons
Came here to say something similar. Glad I'm not the only one. Wish that more
people knew about and used LyX. Yes, regular word processors (eg, MS Word)
suck! There are already pre-existing better alternatives, such as LyX.

------
jogjayr
Can someone who has written novel-length fiction give an explanation of why
you need specialized software? I've never written anything longer than a short
story (on MS Word or Notepad) back when I used to write fiction. So I am not
aware of the problems that accompany a longer work. I always thought if I
started writing again I'd use vim or Sublime Text.

I've heard things like being able to do outlines or charts or whatever. But
those things seem to lend themselves better to handwritten notes or hand-drawn
diagrams.

~~~
nyolfen
evidently, you need it to stroke your ego

(the author of this piece, i mean)

~~~
jogjayr
I understood what you meant and I didn't downvote you. I think you were
downvoted because that wasn't really an answer to my question.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Hmm, can anyone compare this to Scrivener, my current writing tool? Best about
Scrivener is the dragging around of chapters, creating chapters, renaming etc.
in the tree view.

~~~
cstross
His mention of Scrivener in the intro was so brief that I have difficulty
believing he even read the interactive tutorial, much less wrote one or more
books using it. (I've written and published about a dozen novels using
Scrivener, via imprints of Penguin, Macmillan, and Hachette, and I'm a beta-
tester for the forthcoming Scrivener 3.)

While Scrivener doesn't really emphasize page-by-page thumbnails as a
navigation tool (what does, aside from Word or Pages, these days?) it just
about throws the kitchen sink at the problem of how to structure a long
compound document, with corkboard, outliner, and multi-select scrolling
subdocument views of a project (in the current version: the next release is
considerably more powerful).

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Thanks!

------
JulianMorrison
The closest I've come to smooth and flowing writing is using Sublime Text,
pandoc flavored markdown (for the epub support), and pandoc and LaTeX to
process it.

------
dkersten
What I would love is a tool that lets me chart out timelines (ideally with a
visual representation) for characters and story arcs. I want to be able to see
how different characters interact over time (double points if it takes both
time and location into account and let's me, somehow, see this visually, but
I'd settle for just time too). I want to be able to roughly make up how a
story arc interweaves with others and then flesh it out bit by bit. I want to
see how characters are affected etc.

I've tried various other tools (diagramming, Gantt charts, brainstorming
tools, note taking tools...) and they didn't really do it for me.

If such a tool existed for iPad (I've searched and come up blank), I would buy
it in an instant (ok ok price dependent, but I'd be very interested). I'd
almost build it myself, but.. who has the time?

~~~
projectramo
Aeon timeline.

[https://www.aeontimeline.com/](https://www.aeontimeline.com/)

Even syncs with Scrivener.

~~~
jemaddux
That looks awesome. Double points for syncs with scrivener. Thanks

------
mizaru
Real authors use WordStar 4.0

~~~
dangoor
and then can't keep up with the TV series that is started years after the book
series began?

~~~
mizaru
It's not his job to keep up with a prematurely produced TV series, though.

------
fuzzygroup
To me the best thinking around in the design of a writing tool is Scrivener.
It is the first writing tool that seems to understand that writing, research,
note taking a process and the page is the output from that process. My single
objection to Scrivener is that its native data structure is RTF. I dearly wish
it was a pure markdown tool.

------
oconnor0
Has anyone used (Quoll Writer)[0]?

[0]: [https://quollwriter.com/](https://quollwriter.com/)

~~~
wongarsu
I've just imported a story I'm editing into Quoll. It seems quite nice. Little
visual clutter, a decent feature set that helps with keeping track of
characters, scenes etc, organize ideas, keep track of word count targets, keep
you motivated etc. The achievements are a nice touch, and the ability to
invite editors looks helpful (though I haven't tried that)

There are a few bugs (it reordered my chapters when I marked a chapter as
edit-complete the first time. That obviously shouldn't happen).

Overall it seems like a big step up compared to Word. It can't quite keep up
with the feature set of scrivener, but in exchange it has a much more
approachable and clutter-free interface, much closer to the idea of
distraction-free writing.

~~~
oconnor0
What is the process for converting what is written in Quoll into something
printable, like a PDF?

~~~
wongarsu
I would say the export functions are among the weaknesses of Quoll. You can
export to HTML, docx and epub, with the only notable configurable option the
selection of the chapters (and character notes etc) that should be included in
the export. For epubs you can also configure author name and ISBN.

The quality of the exports is not that great. The HTML looks good for
printing, but is a pain to read on screen. The epub looks good, except that it
doesn't display chapter headings. The docx has 8 newlines between paragraphs
when I open it in OpenOffice. I don't have a MS Word on hand right now to
check whose fault that is, but it's unfortunate since I would probably go via
docx to pdf.

------
JohnStrange
I use an expensive payware application (Papyrus Autor) for my German novels
because its spell-checking and style correction is unbeatable. It just works,
which is the most important thing for me in addition to a strong focus on data
integrity and rare updates.

If there was something as powerful as Duden Korrektor for Emacs, I'd
definitely prefer that, though.

------
plg
[https://ia.net/writer/blog/ia-writer-5-from-raw-to-cooked-
to...](https://ia.net/writer/blog/ia-writer-5-from-raw-to-cooked-to-sushi/)

------
altschuler
At Plotist[1] we're taking a slighty different approach to the writing
process, where the writing module (which is coming soon) will stand alongside
the world building parts of the application.

We've found this to be a great way to keep yourself organized and to make use
of all the notes about characters, locations, events, etc. that build up over
time.

This doesn't mean that the actual writing view has to be cluttered, but it's
available when you need it. And we agree with the people here who like working
with their chapters as a tree :-)

[1] [https://www.plotist.com](https://www.plotist.com)

------
criddell
Unless I missed it, he never mentioned a particular platform. Given the list
of applications he's tried, I'm guessing Windows or macOS is where he does his
work.

I wonder if he's ever considered working on an iPad with a keyboard. Since the
10.5" iPad came out, I've been doing just that and it's by far my favorite
device to work on. Amazing battery life, super portable, fast, and focused.

------
gt_
Shoot me. This 'story' method of describing software is awful.

------
aembleton
If Dropbox Paper would work offline, then I think that'd be perfect for me.

~~~
projectramo
Google docs?

------
megamindbrian
Follow the white rabbit...

------
unixhero
Better than Scrivener?

------
companyhen
Is this related to the NEO Smart Economy? [http://neo.org](http://neo.org)

