![]() ![]() If you just want a well round, well supported text-editor for your iPad, get Byword and get writing. If you want a dark mode to work with and a bit more customization, Elements is a great choice (provided you don't want a Mac client to go with it). If you are more concerned about writing without distraction, iA Writer may be a better choice (provided you can live with Markdown previews). Just choose your syncing option, a folder you'd like to save things to, and start writing. It syncs everything seamlessly, and it's incredibly easy to get started with. It is a great balance between functionality and simplicity. While Byword, iA Writer, and Elements are all excellent choices for editing and sharing text, Byword is currently the best choice. Elements is on top of the price range at $4.99. However, it feels like nobody has put a really large document in there and thought “is this usable?” Given it is specifically targeted at writers, I am not sure how they imagined it would be used, or maybe did not think through the use-cases beyond somebody writing fiction linearly.IA Writer is by far the cheapest of the three note-taking apps at just $0.99. This comes up a lot because you have to put references in the bottom of the document, so I am constantly scrolling down to the bottom, adding a reference, then trying to find where I was writing so that I can insert the appropriate footnote marker and continue working. ![]() iA Writer does not do this, so the only way to navigate around a large document is to remember all of your headings and use the text search to locate them again. Google Docs automatically generates a navigation bar on the left, based on all of your chapter titles and sub-headings. ![]() You cannot see what you are working on, and if you scroll to that point in the preview panel, you lose your place where you are writing. Therefore the text and preview panel are always out of sync. As I scroll down one, the other one scrolls, but at a slightly different speed. This is one of the most annoying features: the text panel and the preview panel are not properly synced. The only way to do it is to upload it to the web, or use a full file path, such as file:///Users/me/Documents/Book/images/example.jpg. So I could just drop an image into the directory and say image 5 is “example.jpg”. Markdown requires this, but I would have expected URI support. You can embed images in your articles, but you have to give them a URL. You can enable typewriter mode so the current line is always centred on the screen, though this feels a bit like a gimmick so far. You get a simple interface that you can take full screen to remove all distractions, and the layout and style are well thought out. The idea behind iA Writer is to allow you to concentrate on the words. IA Writer handles these large files fine, but the rest is a mixed bag. Google Docs works great, but as you start getting up to 50,000+ plus it starts to really struggle. The big advantage for me, over Google Docs, is that it can handle large files. It uses the Markdown syntax, so instead of a WYSIWYG editor, you get text on one side, that you have to use markup in, and a preview pane on the other. IA Writer is very different in that it is a pure text editor. It has all the features you would expect from a word processor and automatically generates a navigation structure on the left hand side so you can quickly jump around the document. Previously I would use Google Docs, which has been very good. Recently I trialled using iA Writer as my word processor of choice for writing. ![]()
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