A minimum for a novel writing tool is that one can actually send the novel out in a format where your agent and editor will read it. Otherwise you're not getting that novel published.
My partner tells me that it has to be formatted a certain way down to the font and line spacing too or they won't accept it.
I'm cracking up at all these comments suggesting that her recipients brew install pandoc lol. Good luck with that.
When startups haven't even started up yet but are worrying about how they can scale to billion-dollar unicorn level, a common refrain on Hacker News has been "you are not Google."
Allow me to give you the fiction writers' equivalent: you are not George R.R. Martin.
And if you want to let it proof read by George R.R. Martin you can even convert it to WordStar....magic eh? Pandoc can do that...your MS Word too?
Yes, it's possible to convert Markdown to a Word file, with a variety of tools. You can use Pandoc to do this if you are the sort of person who is comfortable using tools like Pandoc. I can do that, along with all sorts of other things, because I am that sort of nerd.
However, most fiction writers and editors are not that sort of nerd. Most people don't want to use Markdown in the first place. Of the people who do want to use Markdown, not all of them are that sort of nerd, either. They want an "Export to > DOCX" command in their editor, not "save the Markdown file, open your terminal app, change to your documents directory, and type "pandoc -o my-novel.docx my-novel.md". (And that's assuming they're not doing something like, well, what NovelWriter does, saving individual chapters and perhaps even individual scenes as independent files.)
Look, I love Pandoc. It's great. But it's not a tool for everyone. If someone is trying to embrace the plain text lifestyle with a tool like NovelWriter but pointing out not being able to export to a Word file is a problem for them, asking "are you comfortable with Unix command line tools" and then telling them about Pandoc if they say yes might be a great idea -- but starting out with "obviously you hate the Unix way", maybe not so much.
> you can even convert it to WordStar....magic eh? Pandoc can do that.
No, in fact it cannot. :)
This is totally unrelated to the gist of this thread, but I just wanted to point out that novelWriter's project builder outputs to a single file, which can be markdown, ODF, PDF, HTML, and others. Pandoc could then make a single DOCX file out of that.
Your point still stands that this is too complicated for the average user, but I just wanted to mention this since it might make a difference for technically minded writers considering novelWriter.
Second...it really cant.
Shame on me, and sorry for my tone.
The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with this, since we're not talking about programming, we're talking about writing.
Has nothing todo with programming, a real hammer is better as the backside of an axe. A Specialized Knife is better then a Swiss-Pocket Knife. One tool for one job but make that job perfect.
The idea that a specialized tool is always better than a multi-tasking tool is simply not true. One must only look at the popularity and utility of leatherman multi-tools to see this to be true.
Even in programming circles, one needs only to look at how many options there are for ‘ls’ to see that “one tool for one purpose” is not always the best thing.
It is hence the name specialized, but if you have to live with a all-round tool then that whats you have.
>one needs only to look at how many options there are for ‘ls’ to see that “one tool for one purpose” is not always the best thing.
The gnu or the bsd one ;)