Review of some free text editors

This week, I’m going to break down some free text editors available for iPad, though some of these are also available on multiple platforms. I will note one trend I’ve seen, pretty much across the board: if the editor is free, it doesn’t do Rich Text; if it does it uses a proprietary storage format–that is, if you want to edit with bold/italic/underline, use inline graphics, use bulleted lists, etc, you have to either pony up some cash or deal with files that are not saved in RTF format. While seemingly a small hassle, it can get distracting to not have basic word processing tools like bold and bullets. Same is true with file formats; it’s a reasonably simple thing to copy-and-paste, until the document is more than a few pages long, and then Donovan’s Corollary of Proportionality to Murphy’s Constant kicks in. Murphy’s Constant, for those unaware, is “Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value,” and my corollary to that is “the chance of damage is proportional to the amount of matter”; this implies that the longer your copy-and-paste is, the more likely it is to import incorrectly, and the more likely it is to need fixing. In an ideal Author-using-an-iPad-to-write-with world, there’d be a simple, free-as-in-beer RTF editor that stored data in standard RTF files. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

With that in mind, it is perfectly reasonable to use the free options that are available, along with one (and quite possibly more) of the free storage options noted earlier (also, see my followup), and write down those things that hit you while sitting in line at the Motor Vehicle or Emissions sites, or while waiting for your Venti Peppermint Mocha, or whatever. I do not, however, recommend using these for all of your whole writing project except as an experiment; there’s so much effort involved in massaging and hand-holding their output into a powerhouse word processor that it’s much less hassle to use that word processor for your book or project. A brief note: nearly everywhere you might want to publish, whether that is through traditional publishing houses, artisanal publishing such as is covered in the APE book, or any other way, you’ll need to output your final manuscript as a Word file (.DOC or .DOCX). That’s just the way it works, right now.

As a later blog entry, I am going to sit down and make an actual recommendation including recommended configurations and installs for a Cloud Age Author (I really should trademark that, huh?), as a guide to getting started and going forward. Also, I want to note that in most cases, I link directly to the App Store or website for whatever I link, but there are occasionally links to desktop software, and occasionally to books or other things. When I link those items, the links are generated from my Amazon Associates account, which means that if you click on them and purchase the item, I get a very small referral fee. It’s not much, but in the interest of full disclosure, wanted to make sure you were aware of that.

The Editors

• Free (as in beer); using it requires free registration.
• When registered, free version will maintain 10 levels of revision (meaning, it will keep the last nine saved versions of a document, and also the current version)
• Multiple Mac OS applications can connect to it (Scrivener, Notational Velocity, Justnotes)
• Ability to tag and organize notes
• Premium version ($19.99/year) allows connection to Dropbox for storage, as well as a 200% increase in revision storage (maintains 30 levels of revision in premium) and other perks.
• Search function; search box is at the top of the note organizer area, and searches through the currently selected group of notes. To search all notes, select the “All Notes” group.

• Plain text only (no bold, no italics, no bulleted lists, etc.)
• While not hard to set up, does require a little bit of setup to use even the free version to its full potential
• Requires registration to use.

Pros: