It is a place to collect all of your writings and it does that better than anything else I have tried.

-J-Mac (December 29, 2008, 08:00 PM)

I agree, and I have tried countless similar programs. The Journal is good software.

As a warning to people like me (i.e. very superficial, prone to instant decisions on software based on the first screenshot) -- do not be put off by the initial appearance of the program. The menus don't use anti-aliased fonts (if you have ClearType enabled) , so they look like something from Windows 9x. It suggests the programs hasn't been updated in years. I almost stopped right there. See, I'm superficial (mind you, someone else has raised the issue in the program's forum, so I'm not the only one).

But I gave it a full trial and I'm glad I did. It's a great writing environment and, critically, the export functions are excellent. Version 5 is on the way, and the developer is friendly and approachable. I use it to draft long pieces of writing, before exporting the material to Word for final presentation work.

For me, the only other program that comes close is Whizfolders, but I think The Journal has the edge for now. PageFour is also nice, but not as powerful or flexible.

PS: For those looking for a journal program -- ignore my comments. I actually don't use the journal component at all, just the notebook part, for general non-journal writing. But for me it's good value even when you don't use its core (journal) component.

One of the nice things about Q10 and WriteMonkey (the subjects of the first post in this topic) is that they both allow you to set a bottom margin for text. I use this to set the "bottom of the page" halfway up the screen. I hate text falling off the bottom of the screen.

If none of that made sense, this full-screen grab from WriteMonkey might help:



The four dots around the text (if you can see them) mark the margins.

But this is just a poor man's version of what is called "typewriter scrolling" -- where you can set a fixed cursor position (say in the middle of the screen). The extra benefit of this compared to WriteMonkey is that you see any text below the cursor as well. The Mac-only editor Writeroom has typewriter scrolling. Does anyone know of any Windows text editors that have this feature?

Does anyone know of a desktop search program that will search a (Firefox) Scrapbook database in a user-friendly fashion? By which I mean...

Scrapbook simply saves html pages, so any search program will index them. But all the pages are named "index.html". Scrapbook's built-in (non-indexed) search returns page titles rather than file names, which is fine. But the search programs I use (Archivarius, WDS) don't offer this option, so every search of Scrapbook pages just brings back a list of "index.html" pages -- you have to view each one to find what you're looking for. I'd like to find a search program that offers the option to view page titles for HTML files rather than filenames.