>Also, I heard from a writer that Microsoft Office is superior to any word processor (a.k.a computer program you use to write a novel) to the point that he writes novels in Microsoft Word under Wine.
published author here[1] who was talked into using OpenOffice to write a book. It was... pretty bad, worse, even than ms office, which (and yes, I tried) is pretty bad when you start passing back and fourth a monstrosity with a bunch of marked changes. But even with the little incompatibilities fixed, god damn, word processors were just not meant to deal with something that big.
You will find few people writing their second book using a word processor. Word processors are pretty great for short documents that need to be made to look nice quickly, and that have limited collaboration. (yes, modern word processors have really basic revision control functionality, but it sucks compared to using a revision control system.) But yeah, next time? some sort of TeX derivative, or I do the book in text and the publisher can do formatting after it's done.
published author here[1] who was talked into using OpenOffice to write a book. It was... pretty bad, worse, even than ms office, which (and yes, I tried) is pretty bad when you start passing back and fourth a monstrosity with a bunch of marked changes. But even with the little incompatibilities fixed, god damn, word processors were just not meant to deal with something that big.
You will find few people writing their second book using a word processor. Word processors are pretty great for short documents that need to be made to look nice quickly, and that have limited collaboration. (yes, modern word processors have really basic revision control functionality, but it sucks compared to using a revision control system.) But yeah, next time? some sort of TeX derivative, or I do the book in text and the publisher can do formatting after it's done.
[1]http://nostarch.com/xen.htm