Category Archives: Rumblings from the Secret Labs

A Novel Writer Milestone

Posted on by
13

If I do say so myself.

This one talkes on printing, along with some other cool things. It occurred to me as I was preparing documents for submission to publishers that I was going to have to reformat my whole document to make it look good on a printed page and to match publishers guidelines. But I didn’t want to end up with a small, serifed font when I went back to edit the document. Switching back and forth would be a real pain, even with a modern word processor with styles. CSS-based solutions could do it, but there’s still setup and making sure each block of text has the right tags. My program already knows what all the pieces of the document are, so why couldn’t it reformat the text differently for different purposes?

Well, now it does. You can print with the screen settings, with or without margin notes, or you can create any number of presets with different fonts and styles to apply to each of your document elements. Now I can print a manuscript for marking up without messing up the settings I have for editing. Well, I could if I had a printer.

Here’s a complete list of changes for this release. Some of them won’t mean much to Non-JNW users, but I’m really happy with the way things are progressing. Expect to see some further upgrades to margin notes in the next months – every word processor in the world will have these some day, but why wait?

  • resizable margin
  • export by section
  • print by section
  • print cover page option
  • print margin notes
  • print with separate manuscript settings
  • Created Project Menu for access to operations that modify project data not in the main document view.
  • Moved project layout settings from preferences to new project menu, since they are specific to the project
  • Added fields for title and author, along with fields in anticipation of manuscript printing
  • Added ability to export Microsoft Word format (OS X 10.3 and later)
  • add preference to turn on/off alternate text color onscreen and when printing
  • add preference to change text highlight color
  • Made a change to make big files load faster, but it didn't help much
  • bugs fixed:
    • database window not correctly clearing description field when new is clicked
    • splitting text section messes up margin notes
    • disable split menu item when chapter title is active node
    • fix layout recursion bug when splitting large sections with margin notes
    • Fixed bug that would cause parts to display in the incorrect order when there are multiple top-level items (e.g., Books in the default structure)
    • Fixed potential crash when removing project levels in project structure panel


If you’re on a mac, drop by the hut and take a gander!

Thanks!

End User License Agreement

Posted on by
9

There comes a time in every successful software project that one must establish one’s rights. It seems that what lots of people do is find some other company’s agreement and copy it and put their own company name in. They are pirating the anti-piracy language. That can’t help their case in the long term. Also there are templates you can buy with all the necessary legalese, but even they do not hold up in court, apparently. (As an aside, some companies sneak some pretty nasty stuff into those agreements, allowing them to install spyware and giving themselves rights to your work product). The fact that no one reads them and everyone knows no one reads them undermines their validity. Or something like that. I’m no lawyer.

Therefore I have decided to write my own End Users License Agreement, and being a fundamentally lazy person, I have decided to also make that agreement my blog entry for the evening as well:

By accepting this agreement you promise not to be a scumbag software pirate robbing hard-working programmers of their livelihood. I’m not doing this for my health, you know. You are welcome to install Jer’s Novel Writer on any machines you own as an individual. Corporations do not have that right. If you’re part of some giant novel factory you need to pay for a copy for each machine.

Heck, let’s just be reasonable here. Jer’s Software Hut (the Hut) is depending on people like you who know the right thing to do. You know the difference between sharing and stealing (sharing good, stealing bad). If you need to ask a lawyer if it’s OK to do what you want to do, it probably isn’t. Why bother? The lawyer will cost you more than dealing directly with the Hut anyway.

Just to make it clear, while you can buy a license to use this software till the cows come home, Jer’s Software Hut owns the code. It would be silly to do anyway, but you’re promising now that you won’t try to reverse-engineer Jer’s Novel Writer or incorporate any subset of it into some other product without express written permission from the Hut.

I will give you the right, however, to make as many copies of this agreement as you want, and modify it and use or sell it to your heart’s content. If you publish it somewhere, I would appreciate credit. (I can see my EULA-writing career blossoming now.)

Heck, you’re not reading this anyway. I don’t know why I bother. I could put in that I have the rights to anything you create with this software, and you wouldn’t notice. You’ve already clicked “accept” like a good little robot. I’m glad I went with the cheap lawyer.

—–
It’s not the final wording, but it’s close. I would be happy to consider any contributions you might have to offer. I think after I have a couple of beers I’ll be improving some parts.

There is actually a reason I use the tone I do (besides just for fun) – I know that no matter what the EULA says, it’s only as powerful as the lawyers I hire to defend it. I’m trying for a moral protection of my work, rather than a legal one. And if I ever did have to defend my rights in court, I think a reminder to the jury that stealing is stealing no matter what legal mumbo-jumbo they hear can only help me.

Thanks!

Jer’s Novel Writer approaching public beta

Posted on by
Reply

However, what I don’t have is the user registration stuff, which will eventually be part of the commerce solution. The commerce thing will be Web-based, and I want to have my final hosting solution in place first.

So any of you out there have good suggestions about the e-commerce angle? I’ve been looking into PayPal, which seems reasonable, but doesn’t address user codes, software timing out, and stuff like that.

The other requirement for a public beta is a place where people can report bugs, comment on other bugs, and I can update users about progress in fixing those bugs. As long as I have all that, I may as well expand the role of the system into a full BBS where writers can hand out and talk about writing. Or whatever it is they talk about.

This blog entry is really just shameless reuse of the status report I’m adding at jerssoftwarehut.com/. Felt like I had to post something here.

Thanks!

Guess I Should Plug the Software

Posted on by
Reply

– not getting stuck on some detail or having t go back and find something you wrote somewhere a hundred pages ago, and inevitably editing instead of getting new ideas down. Of course, when the time comes to edit, you want to be sure you find all the places you weren’t sure about the first time you wrote them. If you’re not sure you will find the trouble spots later, you won’t be able to let them go for now.

Key features are:
– Outline that grows with your work, or you can use to define the parts of your story ahead of time.
– Character database where with two clicks you can store character names and descriptions for later reference.
– Margin notes so you can jot something down next to text you want to revisit later. This is an amazingly handy function.
– Regular note panel so you can remember the last time you ate.
– It actually knows what a chapter is (or whatever organizational structure you want to use).
– Better performance than most word processors for really, really big documents.
– More accurate page count.

If you are interested in the software, drop me a line. Man, I dig those margin notes.

Thanks!