How to save a buck while improving your writing output

This is going to be a "shorty" of an article, but it may be one of my more helpful ones. Professional writers have and use tools of the trade with which they have longtime familiarity and thus successful use. Not being a full-time writer myself, when I find what appear likely to be good tools to use in writing endeavors, I both understand that using them will require learning and practice – and I am tempted, like right now, to tell others about them – to "share the wealth."

Yesterday I let a friend know about a nifty computer program, Greenshot. With Greenshot you can save an image of your computer monitor screen or a selected portion of the screen, as a "JPEG" image for later use – to see it once again or to use it in publications (on computer or on paper) as you wish.

As I explained to my friend, Greenshot can be downloaded free of cost, from a Web site that is full of such software – "Sourceforge.net." Sourceforge is one of my favorite destinations on the Internet. It contains download links to thousands of "open source" computer programs – some small and handy and some very large and superbly useful. One such piece of software is the one known to all of us as "Open Office." For zero cost it provides most of the features you might find in commercial software, Microsoft’s office suite being one of those.

Probably because Sourceforge was fresh in mind, I visited the Web site yesterday evening and downloaded some new (to me) programs. The truth is that I have yet to fully install them on the computer, but I did study their full descriptions and most of the instructions that accompanied them. Because I already have similar commercial software installed and in use, it is probably acceptable to talk about them in this article, almost as if I knew what I was talking about.

I downloaded a copy of "eSpeak." It is a compact (small) program used to provide the user with a vocalized delivery of computer texts. The programs I already have and use to do that are named "Wordread." I have two of them. Each one gives the choice of delivery in two different voices – one male voice and one female voice. Each voice is from sounds recorded into the software from actual human voice sounds. eSpeak, on the other hand, uses computer-generated sound and provides the user a selection of "voices" comprised of several male voice simulations and several female voice simulations. Comparing the outputs of eSpeak and Wordread might be like comparing Robert/Roberta versus Robot/Robota.

Cruising around Sourceforge some more, I encountered a very large and seemingly very professional program, "Scribus." Scribus is designed for writers and publishers of really polished publications – magazines, booklets, advertisings, and even whole books. It is not really meant for use in the preparation of Web sites and the like, but it could probably be put to use in that regard, too. For publishing that needs to pay close attention to accuracies of color and precision in typography and block formatting, Scribus has the facilities needed to accomplish them all. The program is not small. It took about 30 minutes to download the code to my computer using a high-speed "DSL" connection. Most of my publishing is on the Internet and, thus, I may never make good use of Scribus. Even so, what use I do make of Scribus is very likely to teach me useful things that can be transported into some use within the programs that I do favor.

Last, but not at all least, I downloaded a modestly-sized program, named "Storybook Planner." Storybook Planner promises to correct me in my lackadaisical approaches to writing epic pieces, great big and complicated stories and novels of the type I have yet to attempt. If this computer program can do that, it will have accomplished something that hordes of teachers, mentors, and my several parents and friends have never been able to do. I cannot recollect ever having put any sort of planning effort into the development of a written piece up to now. The paper (keyboard) goes onto the desk, the fingers do their thing, and, ipso-facto, the writing appears. As an example of that sort of slack system, I give you this current article. Once the first word hits the paper (screen), the rest follows. That is how it works now. With Storybook Planner, perhaps things will change for the better – at least the reader may have things better.

So, there you have it – a good place to find and dig up golden treasures of computer software with which to capture images that are otherwise only temporary, to write articles and whole publications as do the professionals, to give voice to visual text, and to plot and plan what you intend to put together as the world’s best piece of writing.

Even if you don’t need any new programs today, pay a visit to Sourceforge. Tomorrow you might wish that you had been introduced to that place ahead of time. It’s fun to visit a gold mine such as Sourceforge. Looking at nuggets is not the same as spending them, but seeing so many in one place is certain to get the juices flowing.