iPad apps for writers?

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  • #210375
    jhmcmullen
    Participant
      0 Pirate Gold Coins
      ErinMH wrote:
      I might check out DocsToGo — does it do track changes? It would be awesome to have something I can do my editing work with, and I know Pages isn’t always faithful with those.

      On my iPod, I read PDFs in DropBox. Is there a good reason to have another app to read in as well?

      Dictionary! Yes! Thank you!

      DocsToGo doesn’t do track changes, at least that I know of.

      Whether you want another reader depends on the PDFs you look at and what you do with them. For instance, I’ve used the iPad for roleplaying games, where I annotate the adventure or game quite heavily with changes I’m going to implement–being able to do that is useful. But if you’re reading PDFs without taking notes, then all you really want is proper zoom (and flow, if the document is so designed), a search function, and fast page rendering. I don’t recall how many of the three DropBox has; haven’t used it enough. (I hate that I can’t do a proper look at XML files, but I haven’t yet found anything to look at XML files on the iPad.)

      Great at theory, terrible at practice.

      #210384
      ErinMH
      Moderator
        0 Pirate Gold Coins

        Ah. I do occasionally need to mark up PDFs for one of my freelance clients, but they require proprietary stamps — and although I know Adobe Reader is available as an app, I’ll have to check into whether it allows that sort of function. For personal use, I don’t usually need to annotate PDFs.

        #210344
        jhmcmullen
        Participant
          0 Pirate Gold Coins

          I had occasion to revisit this in a tangential fashion, because my wife needed Pages and the voice app for pages on her iPad. Now, it’s not what Erin originally asked about, but for ease of reference, I’m adding it to this thread.

          There is a specialized program for manuscripts called (surprise) Manuscript. I just happened to see it in the App store; I suspect that the Scrivener version (when it happens) will be better for books. However, if you’re doing scripts and manuscripts and you can’t wait for the organizational abilities of Scrivener on the iPad, Manuscript might be useful. I say that, remember, without having actually tried the app. It organizes the manuscript process into several sections, including the pitch, the outline, and the chapters.

          Pages seems like a decent little word processor, more strongly oriented to the page layout end than the text generation end. It will import and export Word documents, but I’m not sure how good the export is. It has Track Changes, but Erin says it can occasionally be buggy. My wife reports that the voice recognition software for it is good (but she has no prior experience with voice recognition software: let’s say she was pleasantly surprised that she had to make as few corrections as she did, but that impression might change on acquaintance with other voice recognition software). One of the knocks against it (if you don’t use Pages on the Mac) is that you can’t generate new templates; I did not immediately find a story template, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

          Documents 2 I haven’t played with yet. Its big benefit seems to be integration with a productivity suite at less than the cost of Pages/Numbers/Keynote together.

          If what you really want is the organizational abilities and you can’t wait for Scrivener, Storylist might be suitable. However, at ten bucks I certainly haven’t taken the plunge and don’t know anyone who has.

          There are actually lots of editors/word processors/novel programs; I’m quite overwhelmed. They do seem to come in essentially those three flavours: editors might let you do a bit in terms of presentation, but they are all about text, while word processors add some presentation and page layout, and novel programs usually add in something organizational.

          Great at theory, terrible at practice.

          #215385
          jschara
          Participant
            0 Pirate Gold Coins

            I have Pages, and it imports Word documents pretty well. Usually with some font adaptations. I haven’t had any problems with it. I haven’t used it since the Track Changes update, but that’s a very welcome addition — I hope it works and plays nicely with Track Changes on Word (that would be HUGELY important).

            #210376
            AlexFF
            Participant
              0 Pirate Gold Coins

              Pages does track changes quite well.

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