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Comment by oconnor0 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone used (Quoll Writer)[0]?

I've just imported a story I'm editing into Quoll. It seems quite nice. Little visual clutter, a decent feature set that helps with keeping track of characters, scenes etc, organize ideas, keep track of word count targets, keep you motivated etc. The achievements are a nice touch, and the ability to invite editors looks helpful (though I haven't tried that)

There are a few bugs (it reordered my chapters when I marked a chapter as edit-complete the first time. That obviously shouldn't happen).

Overall it seems like a big step up compared to Word. It can't quite keep up with the feature set of scrivener, but in exchange it has a much more approachable and clutter-free interface, much closer to the idea of distraction-free writing.

What is the process for converting what is written in Quoll into something printable, like a PDF?

I would say the export functions are among the weaknesses of Quoll. You can export to HTML, docx and epub, with the only notable configurable option the selection of the chapters (and character notes etc) that should be included in the export. For epubs you can also configure author name and ISBN.

The quality of the exports is not that great. The HTML looks good for printing, but is a pain to read on screen. The epub looks good, except that it doesn't display chapter headings. The docx has 8 newlines between paragraphs when I open it in OpenOffice. I don't have a MS Word on hand right now to check whose fault that is, but it's unfortunate since I would probably go via docx to pdf.

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