ROUGHDRAFT 3.0

¡Ola, señoritas y señoritos!

Mind if I plug in something? It is about a word processing application which is developed by a writer for writers. Yes, hija, a word processing application for writers. I happen to stumble upon it from StumbleUpon.

Richard Salsbury (I don’t know if you have heard of him, I haven’t), an English author of award-winning short stories, articles and essays; developed RoughDraft, purposely designed for writers like him. It is freeware: meaning, you don’t have to pay a cent to own one. It is downloadable from Mr. Salsbury’s site at http://www.richardsalsbury.com. It is only available for Windows 95, 98, Millenium, NT, 2000 and XP and it will only cause a slight dent on your hard disk space because it is only 1.25 Mb in size.

RoughDraft Version 3.0 was released last April 2005. It has features specifically designed for creative writing: novels, short stories, articles, plays and screenplays although it could be suited for general use. It's designed to be as practical as possible, offering all the features you need, but without being complicated or awkward to use.

It has a special mode feature which allows you to choose screenplay, stage or radio play, prose or normal writing. You could format the paragraphs into that of single-line spacing, 1.5 line or double-line spacing; like that of a typewriter’s! It is equipped with tools for dictionary, spellcheck, word count, calculator and could convert straight quotes into curly quotes and vice versa. Help feature will let you access internet reference like Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com, Dictionary.com, OneLook Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Quotez and RhymeZone; as well as download dictionaries.

Saving of files is in Rich Text Format and Text (*.rtf and *.txt) and it could be opened up in just any of the existing word processors available. RoughDraft is not designed to compete with major commercial word processors and does not provide the following features like a full page view for editing, indexes and tables of contents, tables, pictures, footnotes and a grammar checker.

It has a side panel that could not be removed but could be transferred either left or right depending on your choice. It contains a writing pad and special characters that could be inserted into your articles. You could access other RoughDraft files from there and could open said files in a tabbed page style (a la Mozilla Firefox) instead of a separate page .

There are many features and add-ons that I haven’t yet dissected right here and it is for you to discover and enjoy. For me, I have reached the end of my journey of finding a good word processor that is compatible to me and to any word applications software that is comprehensive yet simple and very light on my hard disk space.

Ciao!

Document done in RoughDraft 3.0, Trebuchet MS font, size 12.