randomly click on links, so I'm not sure what is there. I have used both the Sun mentioned prior and Open Office which works very nicely and is free. I get my Office from where I used to work for free (educational sharing program) otherwise I would be using the free one from Open Office. The last time I used the other one, It was included on a software disc I got from the university....cost was 5.00 for the whole disc.

My person favorite document editor hands down is google docs. It pretty minimalist in function but everything you need is there. But the biggest upside to google docs is that it's pretty much impossible to lose a document. Everything you write is store server side in google massive datacenters.

The secondary advantage is that you can give other people real time editing and viewing right by simple putting in there gmail email into the share function.

I am sure that if I was a real geek, I would know how to save files in such a way that I could simply post it to BCTS and it would paste there such that all the text would look exactly like I wrote it. Well, I'm not. I really like the spell checker in Word, and the ability to set the dictionary to UK English; just a little quirk of mine.

Well, then someone said to try Works, and I used it on Ch1 of "Lt Katia". Everything worked wonderfully; I was able to set the Dictionary the way I want it, and the spell checker worked faboulously. AND, when I posted it that first time, I did not have to go back and insert things.

However, on Ch 2 when I posted it, the same old Word problems surfaced again, and I had to redo all 44,000 bytes, Yallah ! I have Ch 3 about half written and am wondering what will have to be different? I seem to remember Erin saying to insert double spaces between Paras, but I will have to go back to her blogs to check. This becomes really cumbersome when writing dialog. One problem with Works is that in the copy/paste operation, it becomes really cranky and I sometimes have to paste in small segments. I really like to use 40k size files.

I have not tried open office yet, but I have heard disparaging comments about it too. I would use word pad if I knew it would work good, though I think my op system effectively uses it to cut and paste, and it sort of complains about it.

Much peace

Khadijah

I distinctly prefer Word Perfect to MS WORD. MS has probably the worst grammar checker in the industry (finding errors that aren't really errors), doesn't handle parallel columns, and doesn't allow you to view codes and change them. I have written four books using Word Perfect, and have had no problems.

Another alternative is to go with an online editor of some kind. Google Documents isn't nearly as able as OpenOffice.org which in turn is lacking a lot from MS Word. But it can do most of the functions that you need if you're only writing a mostly-textual-in-nature story.

I've heard a lot of good about AbiWord and LyX, but I have no personal experience with either.

Then there's a whole set of other programs that aren't word processors but that can act that way: HTML WYSIWYG editors. Some of these are no worse for writing non-paged stories than a regular word processor would be.