Review: yWriter 5.0
(You must read this before reading the post below)
As Promised, I shall provide reviews on a subjective cum objective methodology.
- Type text: yes
- Format text: partially
- Spell check: ? (need to download a dictionary first)
- Style check: No
- Language prompt: No
- Outline formation: Yes
- Character building: Yes
- Location/division into chapters: Yes
- Scene creator: Yes
- Chronological order and time line: no
- Various views (thread based view, timeline, storyline, etc): partially
- Quick re-ordering of scenes into chapters or sections: yes
- Index card maker: no
- Age tracker: no
- Export into General formats: yes+
- Image insertion/ graph insertion/ etc: partially
- Advanced statistical features like (Average sentences per paragraph, Average words per sentence, Average characters per word, Average words per page, Flesch-Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Automated Readability Index etc.): no
- More advanced features like oft repeated words, oft repeated phrases, etc: yes
- Security: No
- Backup: yes, one click
It’s a word processor which breaks your novel into chapters and scenes. It will not write your novel for you, nor will it suggest plot ideas or perform creative tasks of any kind. It does help you keep track of your work. It leaves your creativity to you
What’s so special about yWriter? What does Simon say?
Simon is the creator of this proprietary tool and gives it for free to everyone. His Novels are of Hal Spacejock and you can purchase them online. Let’s see what Simon says about his software “I really struggled over my first novel because I wrote whole slabs of text into a great big word processor file and tried to make sense of the whole thing at once. I then tried saving each chapter to individual files with great long descriptive filenames, but moving scenes around was a nuisance and I couldn’t get an overview of the whole thing (or easily search for one word amongst 32 files)”
How much does it cost?
Nothing, it’s free to download and use.
Add chapters to the project.
Add scenes, characters, items and locations.
Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total.
Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress)
Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals.
Allows multiple scenes within chapters
Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene.
Multiple characters per scene.
Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work.
Re-order scenes within chapters.
Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations.
Automatic chapter renumbering.
There are lots of usability tweaks such as drag/dropping.
Full screen editor.
Automatic daily zip of the entire project.
Full screen editor.
Automatic daily zip of the entire project.
NEW: Text-to-speech built into the text editor.
My Verdict: Before you try any other software, yWriter 5 is worth a dekko. I have used yWriter 4 for the half of my first book. Then one fine day it crashed. It crushed me. But the good part was that every day after finishing my writing i used to export the project into RTF files. I could therefore simply open my work in any of the app like word/ open office/ wordpad/ abiword… you name it. So I recovered every bit of my work.Overall, i like this software though it has some irritating things in formatting. It does not let you do all things that MS word lets you do in formatting. So sometimes it is irritating. It also has some bugs which can be seen at the google group that simon runs for this purpose. But they are minor and yWriter is a work in progress. Considering that it’s a free product and has a hell lot of stuff which paid software have it is phenomenal expecially the fact that its size is just 900 kb (yes, believe me) and is therefore no resource hogger. It has lighning speed in general.
Lastly, it has this reader engine now which i think uses microsoft t2s engine (not certain). So proof reading can be done by making it read your novel loudly while you hear it for stupidities. yWriter 5 has, however made significant progress over yWriter 4 (which i used) and I am excited about using this version for my upcoming book.
Tags: review: ywriter 5, ywriter 5, yWriter 5.0
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