I thought, “Why spend money when free should do.”
So I tried my hand at setting up LibreOffice Write template for defining a character/location sheet, notes, and manuscript documents. One template to rule them all. Basically setting up paragraph styles for various text elements. Nothing too strenuous for a word processor.
My god, LibreOffice is not up to the task. One it feels slow. The UI is quite painful especially when you want to update a template. Also when you update a template, that does not update existing documents created from that template. Which means if you want the same formatting changes in that document… You have to create a new document and copy over the text or make the manual changes to the paragraphs.
LibreOffice has a default set of paragraphs WHICH YOU CANNOT DELETE! I would love to just start from scratch but not bloody likely here. You can ‘hide’ the default items but as I said above, the program feels really slow! Mousing around is slow. Using the context menu keyboard button in hopes that will speed things along will change your current selection to something else! Battling the interface just to set up simple templates. Ugh.
Then it crashed. That was the nail that killed it for me.
I thought about Word with RTF or using their own Docx format but Word makes a mess of the RTF and Docx is dangerous in my opinion.
I then played around with beefing up Zekaric:Word for RTF export and that is to the point where it will work. The problem is most text editors do not even have a basic spell checking and NaNoWriMo requires a lot of quick and nimble writing that also keeping in mind the mark down format to use for Z:Word will pull you out of the process of just core dumping out your thoughts.
So in the end I plunked down the $67 (CDN) for Scrivener. Enough dicking around with the various programs and options and time to start concentrating on prep work for the writing month. And I think I need that prep work if I am going to get remotely close to completing the task.