Wild Wednesday: Free Apps For Writers

Jane here with some free programs for writers. Don’t have Microsoft Word? No matter, you can download AbiWord and Open Office for free, and they’re great little word processors. I haven’t checked out all the programs, so read about them, do a little research, and if it’s the program you need, download it! They’re free unless marked otherwise.

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AbiWord. A nice little full featured word processor. I’ve had personal experience with this one, and quite liked it.

Publisher’s Description of Abiword

From AbiSource:

AbiWord is a lean yet full-featured word processor. It features a familiar-looking interface, basic character formatting, paragraph alignment, a spell checker, interactive rulers and tabs, styles, unlimited undo/redo, find and replace, and image support. It can also import Microsoft Word 97 and RTF (Rich Text Format) documents, as well as support headers/footers, superscript/subscript, widow/orphan control and newspaper-style columns. Many plug-ins are available. Support for tables is currently limited.

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OpenOffice is another word processor I’ve used, and I loved it. Below are a few words from the publisher.

From OpenOffice.org:

OpenOffice.org is both an open-source product and a project. The product is a multiplatform office productivity suite. It includes desktop applications such as a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation manager, and a drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to those of other office suites. OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.

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Adobe Reader. Good program:) The Publisher says:

From Adobe Systems:

Adobe Reader allows more securely view, print, search, sign, verify, and collaborate on PDF documents, online as well as offline, from your home or office. Reader has a completely redesigned interface, new tools, and new options for viewing information more efficiently. Access to an online, real-time meeting in seconds.

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Foxit PDF Reader. Fast and small, great reader!

From Foxit Software: The following is a list of compelling advantages of Foxit Reader: Incredibly small: The download size of Foxit Reader is only 2.55 MB which is a fraction of Acrobat Reader 22 MB size. Breezing-fast: When you run Foxit Reader, it launches instantly without any delay. You are not forced to view an annoying splash window displaying company logo, author names, etc. Annotation tool: Foxit Reader allows you to draw graphics, highlight text, type text and make notes on a PDF document and then print out or save the annotated document.

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Jarte. Good replacement for WordPad. Compact and fully featured.

From Carolina Road Software:

Jarte is a free, tabbed word processor based on the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine built into Windows. Like WordPad, Jarte is fast starting, easy to use, reliable, requires little screen space, and creates documents perfectly compatible with Word. But Jarte reveals the WordPad engine’s true hidden power by adding many features Microsoft never made available in the WordPad program. Jarte can even be run directly from a USB flash drive.

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McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme with Verse Perfect 2. I’ve never tried this, but I think I will. Got some really good reviews.

From Bryant McGill: Rhyming dictionary and verse editor for songwriters used by over one-hundred thousand people from over 100 countries. Created by American author Bryant McGill, Adam Markowitz, Jim Karol, Chantelle Paige, Bobbi Billard and Jeff Kozlowski. This essential reference now ships with VersePerfect, a powerful cutting-edge editor for songwriters, poets, rappers, MySpace musicians, and creative writers.

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ScriptMaker for InnoSetup. Sounded interesting..

From HiSoft2000: Scriptmaker is a tool that helps you to construct and maintain installation scripts for Jordan Russel’s Inno Setup. InnoSetup it’s script based and can be a real help for the developers. This software is available in different languages.

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Story Master Pro 2.1. Free to try, but after your free trial is up you have to pay $99.95 if you want to keep it. Looks like a fun tool!

From Writer’s Harbor Software: Story Master Pro is a story development tool for writers. Its storyboard design provides a structured environment where you can plan, create and organize all story events. The easy to use interface will help give your story a clear direction and timeline, making it possible to write each scene with confidence. There is also a place to develop characters and solve the many what-if type problems you will encounter as you develop your story. Let Story Master Pro help you discover the advantage of referencing a well-developed storyboard as you write. Version 2.1 includes many design and interface improvements.

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The Sage English Dictionary and Thesaurus 1.4. Definitely going to try this. Great free program!

From SequencePublishing: TheSage’s English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a complete dictionary and a multifaceted thesaurus of the English language. TheSage can look up words directly from almost any program (IE, Word, Firefox, Outlook, Thunderbird) and is 100% portable. It runs locally, and does not use your Internet connection. Notable features include structured lookup display, advanced wildcard search, tabbed interface, anagram search, customizable user-interface, flexible copy-to-clipboard functionality, multi-session history.

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Treepad lite. Edit, format, store, search, and encrypt different kinds of data.

From Freebyte: TreePad Lite is a very intuitive and small, yet powerful personal database program, only 465 K in size. It allows you to store all your notes, e-mails, texts, and hyperlinks into one or multiple databases.

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WordWeb 5.2. Use thesaurus and dictionary to look up words from almost any program. Great ratings from users.

From Antony Lewis:

This thesaurus/dictionary can be used to look up words from almost any program. In addition to displaying sense definitions and synonyms, WordWeb can find sets of related words. The database has more than 150,000 root words and 120,000 synonym sets, many proper nouns, pronunciations, and usage tags. WordWeb works off line, but when online you can also quickly view web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

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Video Ebook Maker 1. Interesting!

From Video Ebook Maker: Video Ebook Maker is a free software application that you can use to create an unlimited supply of personalized video ebooks. The download package includes 12 video ebook templates that you can use for creating video ebooks that feature from 1 to 10 videos each.You can select the videos that will be featured in your video ebooks. Those videos will be streamed from YouTube.com in real time. The personalized video ebooks created with the software application can be given away, but cannot be sold. You can give them away to your friends or use them to help drive traffic to your Website. Included in the download are Activ Ebook Compiler rebranding tools.

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What free programs do you use? We’d love to hear about them!

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Tags: Free, Word processor