A Question About Word Processing, Spelling, Grammar, Language Tools

General Linux Question
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A friend of my wife is writing a book so she roped me in to help guide with the technical side, luckly not the content. The book sounds really boring and doubt it will sell, but thats not my problem.

Many years ago I taught courses at the University on word processing, mainly to professionnel companies who had staff using word 5 for Dos, then word 2 for windows or lotus Amipro… no problems. Page layout, headers footers, styles, left and right pages, margins, gutters, Indexing, table of contents, fonts, land scape portrait … week long courses so very detailed. You name it I covered it. Add in file management and the stuff around the system. Both Apple and Dos or Windows.

Back to the question Really simple stuff to start with. By the way I know how to use the tools not how they work !

Spell checking, easy, you type a word its wrong it underlines it so you right click and it offers a correct version, or if auto correct it set it changes it without telling you. If its a error you make often you can set up auto correct to do that as well.

So the wordprocessing tool (in this case libre office) has a dictionary of words to look at and uses that, plus it adds your known errors to the list.

No problem with that part.

But then we got to grammar and I found I could not easy answer how it worked, in french (like some other languages) we have formal and informal (vous and tu) so the content of a paragraph or sentence is totally different.

So is there a similar table of formats to look at if using one form or another ?
If the book has both formats used can you define this is formal and this is informal ?

The next part was tracking changes.
Easy switch on revision marking.
So you have the old line of text with a line through or different colour. Then the new line of text after the correction.
But is that the best way or do you have another idea ?

The author of the book did not want me to just say it works but wanted to know how, more than just click the spell check button…

Some may comment on dont use libre office but use X or Y instead but it would still be the same questions no matter which tool is used.

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Libreoffice uses extensions for grammar.
They vary. Some of the modern ones use AI. They all use some sort of language model, but that does not really explain ‘how’ they work.
Language models look at sequences of words (phrases) of various lengths.
Sorry, that is about all I understand.
Are there any language experts ?

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Writer here (hobbyist, not author (an author is a published writer)).

In the case of fiction I can highly suggest a specialized piece of software specifically designed for the task: NovelWriter. It’s rock solid and not too big of an application. It performs well too.

It’s a bit like Scrivener, but instead of all the beautifying stuff scrivener has, it supports a markdown-like syntax and has a reference system. Easy to learn and excellent for long-form fiction. It’s also fully FLOSS. The developer is very active and the project is mature. A .deb and AppImage is available. And, no, it’s not such a big mess as Scrivener is.

I can highly suggest doing the basic writing in something specialized such as NW, because you won’t be distracted by all the bells and whistles of LibreOffice and will have everything needed available at a glance.

Then there’s the thing of correct language. Trust me: you don’t want to focus on correct language usage when writing. For that there’s a different stage: the editing stage.

Some of these specialist writing applications have a special mode. It’s either called Hemmingway mode or typewriter mode. In this mode you can’t edit what you typed. This is ideal for those writers who endlessly correct their writing (like me). For NW this is scheduled for version 2.8 (at the moment). This will probably be released somewhere in the coming year, given the activity of the developer. She’s currently busy with the 2.7 release (should be released in days).

It’s best to first just dump your idea into the specialized application. When you’re editing you’re not being creative anymore. This is the exact reason why hordes of those writing applications implement typewriter/Hemmingway mode.

Currently I’m drafting and I’m not worrying about grammar at all. I even have my spell-checker turned off.

LibreOffice is useful for the actual editing stage, not earlier. In earlier stages it’ll simply serve as a distraction from the actual writing. I’ve been there!

LO’s track changes feature and the LanguageTool integration (in case you don’t trust your editor) are quite nice. NOTE: I cancelled my LT subscription because I discovered they were bought out and the servers were promptly transferred to the USA (California), but if you feel you need your grammar checked by a robot with all the potential of having an AI training on your text, go for it.

I’ll reiterate: It’s best to get to know NovelWriter and work in that application.

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Thanks for your suggestion but changing horses will not help her. From what I can gather its more of a technical subject type of thing (not seen copy yet)

Libreoffice may not be ideal but its what she has and knows. Plus its easy for me to do the layout stuff rather than me wasting time trying to find where something is in a new app

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In that case you might also be interested in master/slave document feature of LO. Otherwise LO will become sloooooooow after a few hundred pages.

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Hi Paul
Does this Libre Office extension satisfy any of your requirements?
There’s also this one you could look at too.
Not personally tried either but may be worth a look nonetheless.

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I think I understand how any editing could be a distraction when trying to be creative. I have heard of people using a dictaphone… to avoid even the distraction ( and slowness) of typing.
From my experience with scientific writing, I agree, get it down in any way you can, then tidy it later.
I would like to try creative writing. I have a friend who lectures in it at a local University. He says that the book exists in your mind, before you put pen to paper, and that it continues to exist after publication, in the minds and discussions of people who read it.
So the pen to paper bit is not all there is to the life of a piece of creative work.

Sorry Paul, I am diverting your topic.

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No problem, I do it to others quite often

Thats the one we are using , know it well been on my system from the start.

What I want to know is how it works, and how it copes with different forms such as tu and vous…

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For spelling and grammar, it may be worth having a look at Reverso, available online as well as for Mac and Windows where it can be interactive. There are free and not very expensve subscription options. I don’t know if this answers the question as I don’t use the complete Reverso ecosystem.

I’ve never used software like NovelWriter (@Xander H), and guess that many amateur or part-time authors might ask whether switching from their usual familiar wordprocessor is worth the effort. For routine work I use LibreOffice. The NovelWriter documentation doesn’t mention use as a front end for LaTeX (below).

The mention of specific drafting software raises the question of how far you are then going to take the technical side. Book editors will accept LO or Word files. However if the book is destined for auto-edition, I very strongly recommend LaTeX, because this handles automatically the myriad details of typesetting, pagination and page layout. There are plenty of templates available on the web though, as would be expected in this field, none of them has been entirely pleasing to me.

A difficulty with LaTeX, particularly in French, is that the wordprocessor document will have features, such as non breaking spaces around punctuation, fancy quotation marks, etc., that most authors will have set to automatic insertion. There’s an export filter in LO for LaTeX, but I tend not to use it; it’s a bit too verbose and inconvenient when you’re using a LaTeX template. For scientific stuff with loads of cross-references I type directly into LaTeX. For friends’ books already in Word or LO, I find the quickest way is to use Notepad++ with its MultiReplace extension to delete the unwanted code (it’s Win only, but there’s an unofficial snap package using Wine). Notepad ++ is one of those programs you have to get familiar with and don’t want to replace with something else. In the old days, you would just write a few lines of code.

LaTeX is available from Overleaf on line for free, the limit being the compilation time for a document/project (the number of projects is unlimited). This may be the easiest way to get started. Overleaf begins inviting you to pay when your book gets bigger than about 400 pages, but you can continue working by commenting out a few chapters. If necessary you can then download the project to your PC and finish it there. I use TexLive for that, with the Texstudio editor (which has to be installed after TexLive).

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Yes, that is what I do.

What exactly is auto-edition?

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Auto-edition is where the author or friend sends a typeset document directly to the print shop, with no evaluation, approval or other contribution from a professional editor. Nowadays,the procedure is often totally on line: you upload two PDF files - one for the cover and one for the content - and await delivery of your books. Current printing technology and logistics make it possible to order even a single copy with no great price disadvantage, so you can do a test run or have something like a school project report nicely printed and bound.

If you pay extra, the printer will design the cover, with ISBN barcode, etc. If you do your own cover, the dimensions (with spine width) are calculated for you as a function of paper type and number of pages. If content runs to the edge of the finished page, you can specify “bleed” which is trimmed after printing.

Although wordprocessors have improved with respect to typesetting, the result doesn’t match what can be obtained with specific software. LaTeX is free so you may as well use it for something permanent like a book. There’s a wide choice of character fonts, but if you stay with the usual ones, you can be sure they are specifically designed for printing, unlike web fonts. Among the nice little details, chapters always start on an odd-numbered (right hand) page; pages that should not be numbered are not; and page numbers and running titles are placed so they coincide on the recto and verso sides of a sheet so they don’t show through the paper (which is always slightly transparent). You can declare and use more than one language in a document; the punctuation and other stylistic differences look after themselves.

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Thank you. I am out of touch with that. Yes Latex would be most suitable there. It would constrain you from breaking any of the required style conventions.
In that sense LO is too loose … you could mske some entirely inappropriate choices.

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Here’s what the author of NovelWriter has to say in the project’s about page on the software:

Does this explain the pros of NW?

Also: it’s not all that hard to get into. Half an hour for reviewing the docs and a bit of getting used to the application should set you up to get going with it. Markdown isn’t that hard. Well, this application has a few extensions on that to help the writer get organized.

Yes, it’s not a WYSIWYG editor. That’s not what it’s made for. Like with latex you build the final document, where various options and formats (MS Office and LO writer, f.e.) are available. NW has its own format and is not supposed to be a front-end for latex, but who knows what the future brings?

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Latex may be a good tool, but the author knows like me libreoffice so dont want to change.

There is a french publishing house that accepts pdf does the covers and the isbn plus small print runs so no big deal, she only needs around 100 examples to get the qualification she is after.

It is more about how grammar works and revision marking I need the answer to.

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Regarding the revision marking, there’s the track changes feature of LO.

Edit → Track Changes

LO also has LanguageTool integration as an option. It’s somewhere in the settings. It’s best to have a paid account if you use LT with LO.

Tools → Options → Language and Locales → LanguageTool Server

LT should be able to detect your use of formal vs informal and such cases iirc.

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That in itself is contributing to the problem .
Be open minded.
Be prepared to learn new tools, and to mix and match.
Learning dies not have to bd painful or slow… it can be fun.

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That is what i am using already, I was looking for an alternative …

So for example

I switch on track changes, run grammar check, it changes the form tu to vous, the old form is on strike through or colored, the new format is also displayed corrected, so I can display both side by side.

I wondered if any other tool existed to show both versions to be compared. .

I walk from A to B… you suggest I change my walk to do the same journey because I learn bit self defeating

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It depends what you live for.

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I live to swim walking is for when the pool is closed

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" You can swim (uncomfortably) in water at a temperature slightly above freezing; a tiny drop in temperature-or a miracle-allows you to walk on water. "

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