Hi all. I don’t think I’ll get the answer I want, but I figured I’d ask anyway.

Do any of you know of a word processor that does the following things?

• Has a Draft view (like on MS Word)
• In this draft view, still allows you to use italics/underline
• Is not online based (no Google Docs or Office 365) (they lag like hell once you’re beyond 100 pages or so–I have genuinely tried to work in them!)
• Copes with the entire document being in one file (doesn’t force me to prematurely break the work into chapters and have one file per chapter due to the program lagging or struggling with what should be a relatively basic text file)
• (Optional) Lets you make a table of contents
• Is free, or lower cost than MS Word/MS Office

I’m trying to move away from MS Word, but it seems everything I find that has the first requirement lacks the second, and if they have the second they lack the first. So I continually go running back to Word. (It’ll be interesting to see if they kill Draft view in the future…if they do, that’s the point I go over to Linux entirely!)

Libreoffice/Openoffice (last I looked) does away with the Draft view. It flat out doesn’t have it. There are bug/feature requests open for it that haven’t been addressed for over a decade because programmers forget the needs of actual writers are different from the needs of a programmer. So when I try to use them, I’m forced to stare at print view with massive margins which sucks when I am going through a 80,000+ word document and would rather have that extra space show words, not pretty formatting.

Programming tools like Notepad ++ or other programming IDEs do “draft” view excellently, but don’t give me the italics/underline I need as a novelist because programmers don’t use italics or underline.

I know there’s a significant crowd that shouts, “Do italics/underline later!” but I suspect it might be a divide between writers working with different mediums.

Like, scriptwriters know the actors will decide on delivery. And poets and short-story writers have shorter works where it’s manageable to address italics in the editing phase because you can see the entire work in one screen or with minimal scrolling.

But my stuff tends to be 80,000-300,000 words, and it’s much easier to slap in italics as I go for me (just as I do with punctuation) so editing isn’t putting ALL of them in, just editing what is already there. So having a streamlined word processor that actually handles them in Draft view is high on my priority list.

Any suggestions?

I don’t hold out much hope…but sometimes things surprise me.