Semi-offtopic, but the one feature I wish was more common is (good) equation support. Whenever I try to use a new word processor, no matter how great, I always find myself crawling back to LyX for anything with maths.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
70 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
18021 readers
8 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
My new favourite answer for everything like this is Asciidoc. You can incorporate latex or mathjax directly into docs.
Requires Google Chrome, Google Drive? No thanks...
Works fine in firefox for me. And interestingly, the pwa features still work even though firefox doesn't have first class support for it, meaning you can even access this "website" fully offline after you visit it once.
It doesn't require either of those, google docs integration is entirely optional.
I'm only going by what the website says, if I click "how to install": https://wavemaker.co.uk/blog/how-to-install-a-pwa/ there's no mention here of it working with Firefox or relevant instructions (same as in the FAQ), and if I go to https://wavemaker.cards/ there's no obvious way of installing it and it's heavily promoting Google Drive.
I'm also not sure it's FOSS, this page makes reference to "Open sourcing the code for the older versions" which seems half-hearted at best and I've not found any code yet.
Even if I'm wrong about all of the above I'm still put-off by the Google-centric focus of it all.
Firefox requires this addon to install PWA's onto the system, unfortunately. But the application can be used from any browser if you don't mind using it there.
The source code is available here, and though he mentions only open-sourcing the old version, Version 4 (the latest) appears to be available there under the MIT license.
The Google docs integration is, AFAIK, only there if you want to access your document from anywhere and any device. Otherwise it works perfectly well standalone, allowing you to save your document in either wavemaker format or as a .doc.
It works fine in (Android) Firefox, and supports loading from/saving to local files.
I can't imagine wanting to write a book on my phone though.
Definitely not on a phone, but Android tablets with a keyboard can make decent typing devices.
Is pwa though, that's kinda annoying
I never knew this was a considered a bad thing
I think they mean in the sense that it's not a native desktop app (or mobile)
oh well there goes any interest I had in it lol
A program that's similar in many ways is Manuskript
I'd say it does exactly the same thing, except you just download it and go. There are linux, windows, and mac os versions.
Then for the closed source world, there's Scrivener. I'll not link it because it doesn't support linux. But same concept.
Manuskript is unfortunately a very buggy piece of software, with regular freezes and crashes. And the UI is, in my opinion, extremely clunky and unintuitive. I love open source software, but I can't in good conscience recommend anyone use it.
Scrivener did have a linux version that they stopped developing, and they ended up giving away the last version. Someone packed it in an appimage for easy use, should be able to find it if you search appimage scrivener. It's a pretty feature complete release, and still works well to this day.
I've never actually had problems with Manuskript, but then I don't write anywhere near as much as I tell myself I should.
I also once paid for Scrivener, back when I still used windows regularly.
I seem to have a history of looking for an interesting piece of writing software, and then using it to write a chapter or two, then nothing more.
Another fun writing program (that goes to the other UI extreme) is FocusWriter. I actually managed four or five chapters of a story using it.
Ooh, FocusWriter is a good one. Nowadays I tend to avoid the ultra minimalist ones, but when I used Focus writer it always worked well.
I'm glad to see FocusWriter is still being updated, I used that a ton while I was in college. Great developer.
pwa?
Platypuses With Attitude
Just as I suspected
Platypi
Sounds like an SBC ...
The repos are under https://github.com/wavemakercards, in case anyone else had a bit of trouble finding them.
I saw this on here and it's a really impressive application but my problem with it is that the saving of the files seems to be in some completely unique format and even though you can export it it doesn't really feel good to have to do that with something where you'd spend a lot of time writing.
I had a really good time over the past day and a half spending time writing in the application and I found it fantastic from that standpoint but I have already lost some of the work I've done because you can only have one open "project" at a time and you have to export it and even though it seems to save it it encourages installing as an application so there's problems here that really do need to be addressed so just kind of be forwarned that you're gonna have to export and save frequently, and it's confusing.
What's the catch?
There isn't any. It's open source software that the Dev made for himself, and chose to make available for free.