I’ve honestly never heard of InCopy before and I was wondering if anyone else had used it and what their experiences with it were. I cannot stand the track changes feature in word processors as they don’t always tend to catch when an extra space seems to get added in between all of the red mess.
Thoughts?
I do all my writing in vim (www.vim.org) and use LaTeX if I want to make it look pretty. For version control and tracking changes, I use Mercurial, git, and/or SVN. If you like bare-metal simplicity, I highly recommend these tools. Best of all, they’re open-source. But most people think I’m crazy.
I may have to look into it, thanks!
Scrivener comes highly recommended by some of the writers in my critique group. Apparently it’s a word processor designed specifically with writers in mind. Or something like that. I haven’t used it, but I’ve heard people rave about how useful it is.
InCopy is great for what it is – an editing tool designed to work with InDesign. I don’t really think you’ll find it very friendly as a general word processor, though. If you’re thinking of it for desktop publishing specifically, though, it’s worth a look.
I’m on a Mac, so my recommendations tend to be unfortunately platform-specific. I use Scrivener, which does have a Windows version for most longer works, but use Byword for shorter ones, writing in “Markdown,” which is sort of a simplified formatting markup. (That’s not as scary as it might sound; you’re using a more complicated markup when you italicize or boldface something in BBCode here!)
You can also investigate online editors, like Google Docs, or the new Editorially (https://editorially.com/).
I would not recommend Vim for prose; it’s a very powerful programmers’ editor but it’s rather user hostile. LaTeX is a typesetting markup system and it’s pretty arcane – great if you’re both a computer nerd and a typesetting nerd, not so great otherwise. (I typeset “Indigo Rain” in LaTeX, but I am both of those things.)
I got Scrivener partly because you rated it so highly, and I love it. Not yet investigated Markdown although it sounds useful.
Definitely a lot of things I will have to look into. Thanks!