#Rough draft format update#
#Rough draft format software#
#Rough draft format series#
#Rough draft format download#
#Rough draft format free#

The file format for RoughDraft is Rich Text Format, which means that the files can be directly edited using other packages, such as MS Word, OpenOffice Write or simply WordPad. Every time you open the main file, the text pad will open as well under this tab, making it a handy place to leave notes, place reminders and add to-do items. There is also a selection panel for special characters such as the Euro symbol and accented characters and there are four separate Cut-and-Paste sections which operate independently of the OS cut and paste.įinally there is the Pad Tab, which, if you use it, creates a text file with the same name as the file you are editing and the suffix _Pad.txt. On the Ins Tab, there is a place to have text automatically inserted (Autowords) which pop up as soon as you start typing them and complete with a tab.

#Rough draft format update#

Pressing the Update button on the lower right will refresh your search and redisplay the results and Clear will clear them. Note that the references are to the original search, so if you edit the text, things will shift around. You can also get RoughDraft to search for all instances within a single file and list those for you. This is extremely useful in revisions and editing. By clicking on any one of these references, the relevant file is opened and the cursor moved to the appropriate place in the text. It is shown below on the List Tab after a search through a directory of 31 files for the character name “Carris”. One of the most useful features of RoughDraft is the side panel, which may be displayed on the left or right of the main text window according to preference. In the image to the right you can see that the tool in screenwriting mode with the side-panels suppressed.

I can’t really comment on the screenwriting and stageplay modes as I’m not a screenwriter, but they seem to work well and to have the elements you expect in such a tool.

#Rough draft format software#

The software also has a couple of other modes, for screenplays (shown right), for stage or radio plays, and for prose, which is similar to the normal mode but inserts tabs at the beginning of paragraphs automatically and suppresses double spaces. In the side panel there are four more tabs, the current one showing the Files tab with the Windows Directory Structure above the list of files in the currently selected directory. It’s these little things that make RoughDraft such a pleasure to use. You can also zoom the text display without changing the font size, a feature that can be very useful if you are working against a deadline when your eyes are tired. In normal mode, you can use the Paragraph menu to specify whether you want the text shown in single, double or 1.5 line spacing quite separately from the print menu where you can also specify the line spacing for printed output. Below these is the main editing window, shown here with five files open, with a tab for each one, and the current file highlighted. You can also turn these off and use shortcut keys or menu options.

#Rough draft format series#

I will, by the way, be looking at writing tools for the Mac platform too, later in this series of posts.Īcross the top you get the usual windows menu button bar which may be displayed stacked, as shown here, or as one long menu to maximise vertical screen space. If you have a Mac you can, apparently, run it under Wine or as I do, under a Windows OS in VMware Fusion. Unfortunately, Richard is no longer developing the software, but apparently it runs under Windows Vista and Windows 7, and personally I have found it to be extremely reliable.Īs you can see, it is running here under Windows XP Pro.

#Rough draft format download#

You can download the software and check out Richard’s writing on his website here. The software is called RoughDraft 3.0 and is produced by Richard Salsbury who is himself a writer.

#Rough draft format free#

In this post I am going to offer you an alternative piece of software which is designed for exactly this task and has the added benefit of being free to use. In my last post I went into some detail as to why Microsoft Word was not the best tool for creating long works of fiction, not because it was bad software, but because it wasn’t designed for that purpose.