Whether you’re working on a fiction or non-fiction book, Michael Reed believes it’s vital to have an editor that works the way you want.

CREDIT: Getty Images/Sean Gladwell

This issue, we’re looking at document processors for authors that can be used to write a long, text-based project such as a book. Some you’ll know but other might seem a little leftfield such as Visual Studio Code, better known as a code editor, but with the right extensions, it can be transformed into a perfectly good writing environment for a book. It’s a bit of a DIY solution, but it worked well in our tests.

The LibreOffice Writer module is a traditional word processor with tons of features and integration with the rest of the office suite. On modern hardware, it’s lightweight and fast, and it can turn an older laptop into a powerful writing workstation.

LyX sits on top of the LaTeX markup language. It can reflect things such as font weights on screen, even though it’s not quite a WYSIWYG editor. You may never see LaTeX code while working, but it’s there if you need detailed customisations.

Google Docs is the word processor that makes up part of Google Drive, meaning that it’s the ultimate when it comes to accessing over the cloud. It also has some very nice features such as an extremely up-to-date grammar and spellchecker.

Spelling and grammar checker

All of the solutions have a spellcheck, but the quality varies.

G oogle Docs’s spellchecker is impressive, particularly if you work in an area like technology writing as it always seems to be up to date. For example, it recognises words like ‘Nvidia’ and ‘rasterisation’. Medical science terms such as ‘Neuroectoderm’, ‘parvocellular’ and ‘neurosecretory’ were all recognised, too. In cases where it’s almost bound to be a typo, it autocorrects, and we feel comfortable leaving that enabled.

The checking for grammatical mistakes is also excellent. It picks up things like the infamous ‘the the’ typo and mistakes like ‘John and Harry is going to the beach’. It can spot mistakes such as ‘effect’ instead of ‘affect’ or ‘markup’ rather than ‘mark up’ from the context. However, it doesn’t offer any advice on writing style, as some grammar checkers can.

Impressively, LibreOffice did quite well in this regard, even though it isn’t able to use the same level of cloud-based magic to keep up with specialist terminology. It recognised some medical terms such as ‘neurosecretory’ and ‘melatonin’ but not as many as Google Docs. It doesn’t include a grammar checker at all.

Purely in terms of spellchecking, Visual Studio Code with the LanguageTool extension is at about the same level as LibreOffice when it comes to recognising modern and specialist terms, and company names. The advantage is that it’s a grammar checker, too. It’s not quite on the same level as the Google Docs one, but it has explanations, which Google Docs doesn’t, and some style tips, such as if a sentence is too long or you have started a sentence with the same word too many times. It sometimes generates false positives, particularly in ‘picky’ mode.