Home - Overview - Screenshots - Download - Awards/Reviews - FAQ
RoughDraft is a freeware word processor for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. Although suitable for general use, it has features specifically designed for creative writing: novels, short stories, articles, plays and screenplays. It's designed to be as practical as possible, offering all the features you need, but without being complicated or awkward to use.
RoughDraft has the following features:
- Special modes for plays and screenplays which make formatting easy.
- A side panel that makes common operations quicker and more convenient.
- Instant backup of all open files to the device of your choice - a very convenient way to make sure you don't lose your work.
- Automatic creation of cover pages for manuscript submissions with word and page counts.
- Automatic insertion of user-defined words - for character names or commonly used words.
- Four extra clipboards for inserting longer phrases or paragraphs.
- A comprehensive but simple printing system, including a print preview that shows exactly how your work will look on the page.
- Creation of HTML files of your work for publishing on the web.
- Importing of files in Word 6.0, Word 97 and HTML formats.
- Up to 100 files open at the same time.
- Spellchecking. British and American English dictionaries are included. Dictionaries for many other languages can be downloaded.
- Live spellchecking that underlines misspelled words in red as you type.
- A custom spellchecking dictionary so you can add your own words.
- A dictionary and thesaurus facility (provided by Anthony Lewis' WordWeb program, which has to be installed separately - it's not required to run RoughDraft, but strongly recommended).
- Comprehensive text and paragraph formatting options.
- Saving of files in the popular Rich Text Format (RTF), meaning they can be opened in just about any other word processor.
- Full find and replace, including the ability to list all the matches in the current file or in a number of files.
- Font styles for quicker formatting.
- Shortcut keys for just about everything.
- A comprehensive help system.
RoughDraft is not designed to compete with major commercial word processors and does not provide the following features:
- A full page view for editing (although it does have a full page view for print previewing).
- Indexes and tables of contents.
- Tables.
- Pictures.
- Footnotes.
- A grammar checker (eeurch!)
