The final beta of PageFour prior to the release of version 1.6 will be available for download shortly. One of the enhancements in this version will be the ability to handle smart quotes. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, or unaware that PageFour did not use smart quotes, they are the curly-type single and double quotes used by MS Word.

Up to now, existing PageFour users have been using old fashioned quotes identical to the ‘inch’ symbol. In terms of publishing houses and sending your work to third parties, smart quotes are pretty much expected these days, and they do look a whole lot more attractive.

One of the downsides - and it’s not much of a downside - is that smart quotes only appear correctly when using True Type fonts. Having said that, the only non-True Type font I’ve ever heard of writers using is Courier, and there is a True Type replacement for this called Dark Courier.

All of the other standard fonts - Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, and Arial are True Type.

The addition of smart quotes should please a lot of users, as it was one of the most often requested enhancements. However, a similar ability to handle En and Em Dashes has not been possible for this release. Unfortunately, the work involved is quite considerable, but I will be looking at it for a future release.

Smart Quotes will be switched on by default, but along with a number of other cosmetic changes, can be turned on or off very simply. I’m expecting a few minor ‘glitches’ when it comes to opening and closing quotes, but hopefully these will be ironed out before the official release.

The penultimate beta before the next official release is now available for download. Version 1.54 includes all the changes and additions of the previous betas, as well as the new Merge Pages feature. A full description of this feature can be found in the post below.

To try out this new beta version, visit the beta page and follow the download instructions.

A number of smaller, ‘cosmetic‘ changes are still to be made before the official release of version 1.6. As regards larger functionality, this beta contains all the major work of the upcoming release version. Watch this space for details of the final changes, and the release date.

The Merge Pages feature has now been released as a beta download. As the Help file will not be updated until the release version is made available in a few weeks, a full description follows.

The purpose of Merge Pages is, as the name suggests, to merge any number of PageFour Pages into a single Page. It can be accessed via the right click menu after you select a folder or Pages in a Notebook, or from the Tools menu. In the dialog that pops up, you have the option to change the order of the Pages, choose to exclude them from the merge, open them for viewing in the main PageFour window, and specify the name of the newly merged Page.

The dialog is very straight forward, but a few points are worth mentioning in detail:

1. No blank lines are inserted between the Pages - one is simply appended to the other. This means that if you wish one or two blank lines to appear between chapters, you should add them yourself to each Page before the merge. Options to insert extra elements such as blank lines may be added later, depending on feedback, but my feeling was that over-complicating the process at this stage would have been a mistake.
2. The Remove button only removes a Page from the list about to be merged. It does NOT delete the actual Page in PageFour.
3. The new Page created during the merge will be inserted into the same folder as the first Page in the merge list. The full location of the merged Page will always be shown on the dialog’s status bar prior to the merge being carried out.
4. The name of the new merged Page cannot be the same as a Page you are about to merge. For example, you cannot merge Chapter 1, 2, 3 etc. into “Chapter 1″. This is a protective measure to ensure you do not inadvertently overwrite your own Pages.
5. If a Page with the same name as the new merged Page already exists - from a previous merge, for example - you will be asked if you wish to overwrite this Page before the merge is carried out. If you choose “Yes”, the Page is overwritten, but a snapshot of the old Page is taken first. If you choose “No”, an incremented Page is created - for example “Merged Page(2)”, and the old Page remains as it was.
6. Once the merge is complete, the dialog will close automatically and the merged Page will be opened.
7. The Merge Dialog will default to always appear on top of other Windows. This option can be switched on or off by selecting the “View | Stay on top” menu.
8. Double clicking on any Page in the dialog will open that Page for viewing in PageFour. This should allow you to quickly identify the contents of a Page without closing the Merge Dialog.
9. Shortcut keys exist for most of the merge options. The Del key removes a Page from the list. Enter opens the selected Page. Ctrl + Up or Down moves a Page up or down in the list.

Comments on the new feature are, as always, welcome. Either leave a comment on this post, or contact me direct via the contact page.

It’s always difficult to work out what you should charge for software. In one sense, as a digital download, the software has no ‘real‘ value. Despite what Microsoft or the record industry would have us believe, digital goods, delivered down a high speed connection, are not the same as a DVD you’d buy in a record shop or a loaf of bread freshly cooked at the local bakery.

The costs are mostly in the development, and once the product is completed, tested, and reasonably stable, that’s pretty much it. Sure, you have website costs and bandwidth costs - all ridiculously cheap these days, as well as support costs - not that high when you have a stable, easy to understand product.

Which brings me to PageFour. Over the past year I’ve played around with the pricing many times - all in an effort to determine which figure produces the greatest return. Apologies for my capitalist tendencies. The conclusion I’ve come to is that for small software products such as PageFour, there is a $30 price barrier.

Moving beyond the barrier, even by as little as $5 seems to have a seriously inhibiting effect on buyers. I’m not sure why this is, as $30 is not a vast amount of money, but the barrier does exist. People seem to hesitate, as if what might have been an impulse buy at $29.95 suddenly becomes cause for serious consideration at $34.95.

With that in mind, the price of PageFour will be returning to a more modest $29.95. The crowds have spoken.

The latest user reviews of PageFour can be found on www.download.com. So far, it’s five stars all round, with no dissenting voices. Download.com is a useful site for checking out what users REALLY think of a software product, and as such is always worth a look before you buy - a little like reading reviews on Amazon before buying a book, or IMDB prior to renting a DVD.

So thanks to all 8 reviewers who took the time to share their views of PageFour with the world.

The next beta version of PageFour will be available for download in a few days. This version will contain the new “Merge Pages” feature, which was designed to make putting your finished work together a simpler process.

Most PageFour users structure their work in such a way that each chapter takes up a single Page, but the time does come when the finished work needs to be taken out of PageFour and sent elsewhere - beta readers, publishers, best friends who NEVER criticize, etc. Extracting your work from PageFour is a simple enough process - as existing users know - but with 30 or more chapters in your novel, this comes to a lot of files.

The Merge Pages feature was created with this scenario in mind.

The dialog is very easy to understand, and is accessed from the right click menu after selecting a folder or a number of Pages. These Pages can then be moved up or down before the merge is carried out, and any unwanted Pages (notes for example) removed. The newly merged Page is then written to a PageFour folder for you to edit, export, or do whatever you wish with.

At no point are any of the Pages you are merging over-written, so there is never any danger of losing your work through misunderstanding the feature.

A fuller description will be available next week when the beta is released.

The first thing I would like to say is that I am not an expert in website design, and I am not an expert in Search Engine Optimization. The second thing I would like to say, is that neither are many people who claim to be.

Over the past year I have made so many mistakes with my own website, many of which I only learned about and corrected recently. And the site is still far from perfect. When starting out, I visited forums all over the internet - forums on web design, on SEO, on small businesses, and forums on the pitfalls facing startups.

What I’ve learned from these forums is that a HUGE proportion of the ‘web experts‘ who offer advice are anything but. They don’t know that much more than you or I. Sure, they can offer yes-or-no answers to basic HTML questions, or tell you why Wordpress is better than Blogger, regurgitating the same old discussions you’ve already read twenty times elsewhere.

Anyone can claim to be an expert or a professional when it comes to SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a new field, and without being an expert yourself, it’s difficult to know who’s talking crap and who’s actually speaking the truth.

So before you decide to listen to an expert you meet on a forum; before you pay them money to ‘redesign‘ your website and get you listed in pole position on Google, or, God forbid, ‘submit‘ your site to search engines - take my advice and pay a simple, brief visit to THEIR website.

I’ve drawn up a small checklist of my own that I use to filter the posers from the real thing. It’s by no means comprehensive but I’ve based it on my own experiences and the mistakes that I’ve made. You would be amazed how many SEO ‘experts’ fail many or all of these tests. (more…)

Many recent PageFour users come from countries where English is not the first language, making it impossible for them to use the spell-checker when writing in their native tongue. The current version is heavily biased towards the English speaking world: all the menus and documentation are in English, as is this web-site, and it ships with only three dictionaries pre-installed - all English.

As a first step to rectifying this, I’m making a series of dictionaries in different languages available for download. These dictionaries cover most major Western languages - I’m afraid accommodating the East is a little beyond the scope of the product at this stage. The quality of these dictionaries may vary, as many different people were involved in their development.

Full details, as well as installation instructions can be found on the new Dictionaries page.

Though I would like to add these dictionaries to the PageFour installation, I’m afraid it would increase the download size substantially, so for the time being they will have to be downloaded manually where required. In the future, I may look into making PageFour more international - possibly allowing the menus to be localised using external files, but that’s some time away.

Sales of PageFour have been encouraging over the past few months. It seems that word is slowly spreading as more and more people try it out. In the early days, soon after version 1 was released, people tended to stumble across the product through Google search strings relating to writing, or via software download sites. The numbers were never great, and sales slow to come.

Over the past six months, a large proportion of visitors who reached the site, did so through typing ‘PageFour‘ into Google - not blind searches, but specifically looking for the product. The release of the FREE EDITION and the removal of the 30 day trial limit back in September may also have contributed. As for the download sites, they still play their part, but only in a small way - providing incoming links which help with Google Page Ranking. In terms of numbers of downloads, they account for very few.

So where in the world are the buyers coming from?

As expected when it comes to buying downloadable software, the largest proportion is from the US. The figures that have surprised me over the past year are the comparatively high number of sales to Australia, as well as some of the ‘other‘ countries that pop up.

PageFour is not friendly to languages other than English, either in terms of menus and documentation, or dictionaries and spell-checkers - which is why for a product aimed at creative writers, sales to non-English speaking countries always come as a bit of a surprise.

These countries include Sweden and Norway, Mexico and Brazil, Germany, Spain and India. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be looking into providing friendlier options for those writing in other languages.

Beta version 1.53 of PageFour was released this morning. Download instructions can be found on the beta page.

As well as the vastly improved Searching capabilities outlined below, this version contains two new features and a number of minor changes and bug fixes. The new features are an expanded word counter and a new ‘Open in Tabs’ option.

Up to now, the word count has been limited to the single open Page, making it a difficult and time consuming process to build a combined total for all Pages of your current work. A new option called Folder Word Count has been added to the Tools menu and to the right click menu for the current Notebook. It is only enabled when you select a folder containing one or more pages.

On selecting this option you may be asked for your password, but only when the folder you are counting contains Pages that are password protected. If you choose to cancel out of the password dialog, the count will proceed, excluding any password protected Pages.

The word count button and short cut (Ctrl+Shift+W) will continue to function as they do now - working on the current Page. Performing the more extensive Folder count can only be done by using the menu options.

The second new feature in this release allows every Page in a folder to be opened into a new tab simultaneously. It’s an advanced feature which may not be to everybody’s taste, but cost nothing in terms of extra screen space or software complexity. Right click on any folder in the currently open Notebook and the first menu option will show Open in Tabs.

This replaces the previous ‘Open‘ feature which did nothing more than expand a folder to show any Pages and sub-folders it might contain - a feature that still exists through using the plus and minus keys when a folder has been selected.

An upper limit of 20 Pages has been set, though this may change if it proves insufficient. The reason this limit has been put in place is because a folder may easily contain hundreds of Pages, and opening such a great number, though possible, would serve little purpose but to add confusion.

The feature works best when you have structured your work across many folders. For example, your current novel, along with notes, character summaries etc., all in the same folder, or within sub-folders of the same folder.