One of the applications that is available, on both Windows and on the Mac is Scrivener. It seems fairly clear at the moment that there will not be a Scrivener for iPad, any time soon. If a Scrivener for iPad does become available then I think I would be first in the queue to buy that application. In the meantime, there seems to be a surge in popularity in using plain text for writing. There are a number of advantages in using plain text, rather than that of a proprietary document format, that you would find in an office style application or any other one-off type of app for the iPad.

Writing documents is one of the first things that comes to mind, when looking at what is an iPad used for. The thing is, is that when you are writing documents, it is quite likely that you will want to share your documents with other computer users. If you are using a proprietary format, then it is quite likely that you will run into some difficulties at some point in time. Even when a document is converted from one format to another, for example if you are converting from a Microsoft Word format into something that can be read by some other application, there can be problems with formatting and fonts. Whereas if you are using plain text format you are guaranteed that, you yourself will be able to use that text in just about any application at a later stage. You will have complete ease of import into iWork iPad applications and also into the applications that use the proprietary format.

There are a large number of writers and authors applications for the iPad and it seems to me that the better ones are the apps that allow you to write without distraction. Get the ideas out of your head and into a text document that can be read easily using an application such as Nebulous Notes, SimpleNote, Plaintext. Then you can worry at a later stage, about setting formatting, such as headers, bold or italic text.

Another way of writing is to give the text some basic formatting using text characters and this is called markdown or multi-markdown. With markdown you can use a hash tag to insert headers, use the asterix to create lists and also to give the bold or italics format to words within your text. The beauty of this is that the markdown application, allows easy conversion to HTML, but while it is in markdown format it is still nice and easy to read.

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