As some of you may've already noticed I'm currently in preparation and brainstorming stages for a new RPG project, one I hope to actually finish by next year.

And one of the things that has occurred to me, is that the OpenOffice software is kind of rubbish for developing a living document of the kind and size that an RPG represents.

Leaving aside layout considerations, that's something that can be done later, possibly by better artists than I if I can get the funds for it, what I mean more is the development of the document itself in terms of structure and things.

Say I have the outline for the book, and I want to be able to add to individual sections, move sections, jump between sections, and so forth, relatively easily.  This is kind of a non-trivial task in a standard word processor, but I've no familiarity with any alternatives.

What do you folks use?  Any tips, suggestions, recommendations?

Something I usually struggle with too. If I'm working on an outline thats changing very rapidly, I might work on it as sets of ideas and notes in Excel to start with. For documents though, it looks like Open Office has ways and means to do what you want ? Link here with notes on section navigation/rearrangement:
 
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/11/jumping_to_part.html
 
(I normally use Word, so I'm curious as to if that does anything similar or if I should try Open Office instead...)

Quote from: J Arcane;479848As some of you may've already noticed I'm currently in preparation and brainstorming stages for a new RPG project, one I hope to actually finish by next year.

And one of the things that has occurred to me, is that the OpenOffice software is kind of rubbish for developing a living document of the kind and size that an RPG represents.

Leaving aside layout considerations, that's something that can be done later, possibly by better artists than I if I can get the funds for it, what I mean more is the development of the document itself in terms of structure and things.

Say I have the outline for the book, and I want to be able to add to individual sections, move sections, jump between sections, and so forth, relatively easily.  This is kind of a non-trivial task in a standard word processor, but I've no familiarity with any alternatives.

What do you folks use?  Any tips, suggestions, recommendations?

I use microsoft word. It is a little pricey, but I honeslty can't imagine writing and managing my budget without MS Word and Excel (powerpoint comes in handy as well for making diagrams).

I find in word it is pretty easy to re-organize and create linkes (just keep in mind these links and much of the formatting won't transfer well to you layout program (unless you want to deal with the headache of retaining all that coding which I don't suggest).

Have you tried using a text editor rather than a word processor? The more advanced ones like Vim tend to be designed for programmers, so they have lots of features. Admittedly they may not do exactly what you want and the learning curve isn't so much a J shape as a cliff face in many cases (well, at least in the case of Vim. I started using Vimperator, which is a plugin for Firefox that allows you to use Vim-style key combinations as an interface, last year for my web browsing pleasure and found it good, so I downloaded Vim as well and holy fucking shit fuck that shit), but they're a lot more responsive than any word processor could ever be and using keyboard commands is just so much better than using the mouse. Once you learn them, I mean.
My favourite text editor is Nano, for what that's worth. Not much. Notepad++ is pretty nice as well, apparently it incorporates stuff like spell checkers if that's your bag. I don need no steenkin graphics though, so can't tell you a hell of a lot more about it.

For reals though, text editor + multiple documents in a single folder is probably the best solution for what you seem to want to do. Write a script using Python or a similar easy language that concatenates all your documents together based on their file names (so you can move a section around just by renaming it from 003_chargen.txt to 0015_chargen.txt, which will place it directly after whatever the 001_*.txt file might be) - and I've written scripts along these lines, so trust me it is easy - and then just 'jump around' using your file manager (which would be My Computer, if you're a Windows type). The script may seem unnecessary but it beats the shit out of ctrl+a ctrl+c ctrl+v'ing all day, especially if you want to compile your documents together reasonably quickly.

Alright, sure, this is a bit low tech, and it may or may not be what you actually want/need, but there are a few advantages to be had here, not the least of which is the fact a text editors tend to discourage you from trying to mess with the layout (which should be done in proper DTP software rather than a word processor anyway. Unless you want your file to look like shit), which is a big time saver. So, as I mentioned before, are keyboard focussed UIs. Text files tend to be more portable than .odt/.doc/.etc files as well, if that's likely to come up.

Quote from: Lord Rocket;479861For reals though, text editor + multiple documents in a single folder is probably the best solution for what you seem to want to do.

I'd agree with this. I would also suggest looking at LaTeX for document formatting. Anything over a few pages gets painful to do in something like Word, and if you need support for cross references, citations, etc... LaTeX is the best I've seen.

I haven't used it, but many people I know swear by Scrivener.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;481216I haven't used it, but many people I know swear by Scrivener.

Unfortunately, it's Mac only, but it was actually the piece of software that inspired me to go looking for a Windows alternative.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like there's a beta version for Windows.  I shall give it a look.