Review
This review applies to version 2.3
The latest version of this software will soon be reviewed by our
informers.
yWriter2 – also known as Novel Builder – refers to version 2 of yWriter, a free and comprehensive tool to organize, manage, write, and edit your creative projects. It includes a number of terribly useful tools to help you keep an eye on how your book is developing, such as a storyboard, a neat viewer of summary cards, and a complete scene, chapter, and file organizer.
Though it certainly includes a text editor as one of its many assets, yWriter is more focused on having a clear overview of your project than in the final layout of your book. This is a tool for writers, not for editors. Thus, do not expect to find here the extensive list of editing functions that commercial – and extensively well-known - word processors provide you with. TXT and HTML are its two favorite text formats, and therefore they are the only types of documents supported, either when importing text to your book or when exporting text out of your project.
To make up for these editing and format limitations, yWriter comes with a battery of tools and functions that will make your work as a professional writer much easier. To let you have each chapter perfectly described and organized within the whole book, you can attach to each file a synopsis, a status, an outline, and even a specific point in time. Chapters can be shuffled, removed, renamed, and moved in any way without tearing your book down to pieces. When it comes to structuring your work and your novels, is when yWriter makes up for its lack of fancy editing functions. The same goes for scenes, letting you break down your long chapters into clearer and smaller sections, making them easier to handle and revise. You can check your efficiency by using the Word Count Target, which lets you assign a specific number of pages to a given period of time.
Finally, it is interesting to note that yWriter also includes spell-checking capabilities. To save you time, it will look for the most common spelling mistakes, and for those “Problem Words” that you add to its glossary, thus letting you adapt this functionality to your own writing habits.
Please, note that at the time of writing this review yWriter2 is far from being the most updated version of this impressive tool. yWriter5 is already available, with extended functionality and an updated look and feel. |
