Tools for (budding) novelists

Plume Creator

Plume Creator is available in the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian based distributions [5]. Otherwise, you can find the tool's source code on SourceForge [6] or GitHub [7]. The user interface appears to be a hodge podge of German, English, and French.

When creating a new project, you must choose between a Short Story , Short Novel , Novel , or Long Novel . Plume Creator sorts projects into one or more volumes, each of which is divided into several Acts , which in turn are divided into chapters, split into scenes.

Plume Creator shows an overview of completed work in the main window (Figure 9). Double-clicking on a scene opens it in a separate tab, where you can enter text. In the basic settings, you specify the font, font size, paragraph indentation, and the margin size. You can choose any fonts installed on your system.

Figure 9: Plume Creator gives the impression of being not quite finished.

The text can only be formatted in bold and italics. You can also switch to full-screen mode. At the bottom of the window, the editor counts the number of words in the chapter, book, and project. There are no statistical or analysis tools. Plume Creator uses the Hunspell dictionaries employed by LibreOffice and Firefox for spelling corrections. You can add more dictionaries if you wish.

Use the sidebar to save notes, as well as view chapter summaries. There's also a second sidebar which displays a simple list of all the characters, objects, and locations that appear in the story. Use the separate "drawing board" window to specify the order of the chapters and scenes and add text to the same.

Many functions seem to be broken, and the program contains numerous errors. For example, the toolbar didn't appear when we tested Plume Creator in Ubuntu 16.10. Provided you can get the program to work, completed works can be exported as a CSV file, HTML page, ODF, PDF, or plain text.

Conclusion

All four of the above programs can be a little overwhelming at first for beginners. User manuals or at least tooltips are largely missing. However, once users have mastered the programs, they can help organize the characters and plot. The text editor is a sticking point for all the above applications, supporting only rudimentary functions. Valuable writing aids, such as style guides and text analysis, are often missing. These tools are somewhat behind paid authoring software, such as Papyrus Author for Windows [8].

At a fundamental level, all four of these tools amount to little more than an electronic storyboard and to-do lists. Manuskript and Plume Creator also suffered from some software errors, which in the case of Manuskript resulted in data loss. oStorybook offers many useful overviews, but with a confusing user interface, limiting each text entry to around 32,000 characters. Alternative tools are unlikely to be of any use either, given the obsolete dependencies (see the Getting Long in the Tooth box).

Getting Long in the Tooth

The three authoring tools Scrivener, Writer's Cafe, and Trelby are also available online. The commercial software Scrivener officially runs only on Windows, Mac OS, and iOS [9]. If you plumb the depths of the Scrivener forum, however, you can find a beta of a Linux version, which has since been abandoned by the developers.

Although there is an official Linux version for the commercial application Writer's Cafe, the obsolete libpng12 library is required [10], which no longer exists in most Linux distros, including Ubuntu.

The open-source program Trelby specializes in screenwriting [11]. However, the most recent version 2.2 dates back to 2012 and will not work with modern Linux distributions without some major technical wizardry.

In spite of these limitations, these programs can help budding authors to build stories. Bibisco is the best in our books. The creation process, which is quite linear, guides the author from a basic idea to a plot outline, whereupon they only need fill in the details. Experienced writers are, however, likely to work more effectively with a mixture of LibreOffice Writer, Notepad, the Mindmap program, and a good old-fashioned box full of cards. (See also the "Organon" box.) l

Organon

Organon is an extension for OpenOffice and LibreOffice (Figure 10), which enables the author to split a longer text into several smaller parts and then condense them into virtual folders. To do this, the extension on the left side of the page displays a tree view in which new text snippets are created and where existing ones can be sorted.

Use a second new sidebar on the right-hand side to assign one or more tags to the currently open text. For example, the text may be characterized by the characters Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty . Organon has its own search function, which also understands regular expressions. The search function can highlight all references in color or with a tag.

Organon is currently only available as a beta, which only functions with LibreOffice 5.1 [12]. While word processing, we found Organon often crashed LibreOffice. The developers are working hard on a stable version 1.0. Check GitHub to monitor their progress [13]; the extension itself has been released under the Apache License 2.0.