Editomat helps you polish your writing.

It will not change your text, but will highlight areas that you may want to examine and consider reworking.

The main window is an editable view of your document.

You can load a text document directly into the main text window with the File/Load menu option, or you can cut/paste into the main window from your word processor.

You can navigate with cursor keys or Emacs control keys.

You can save your changes with
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Editomat can edit pure ASCII files - files saved from Word as .txt.

Or, you can cut/paste from a word processor like Word or OpenOffice into the main Editomat screen.

Or you can attach Editomat to a document that is currently open in MS Word.

To load a .txt file:

1. Click the File Menu.
2. Select the Open option.
3. Browse to the file you want to load and select it.

Editomat remembers the last 10 files you've edited.

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The File/Attach Menu option attaches Editomat to a document currently being edited in MS Word.

When Editomat is attached to a word document, the Editomat text window vanishes and only the button bar remains. Editomat buttons will now highlight sections of the Word document and the contents of the Word document are used to generate reports.

When you attached Editomat to a word document, all the normal MS Word features like copy/paste, undo and global search and replace function as normal.

The File/Import menu option copies the word document from MS Word into the Editomat text window. You can analyze and edit the document in the Editomat window, then use the File/Export menu option to replace your original Word document with the edited copy.

Import and Export perform the analyses faster than Attaching, but any formatting
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After you do an analysis or two the screen can be cluttered with highlighted words and phrases.

The bleach bottle will remove the highlights, giving you a clean screen for your next analysis.

That mot juste is often just off the tip of our tongue.

That's why they invented the thesaurus.

Editomat includes the Moby Thesaurus (http://moby-thesaurus.org), one of the largest word collections available.

Double-click on a word, and Editomat will try to find entries in the thesaurus with potential synonyms.

The thesaurus listing includes the base word, for example shout, rather than shouted. When Editomat can't find the word you double-clicked, it tries to reduce the word to the base word and looking for the new word. Thus, if you double-click "shouted", you'll get a listing for "shout".

If Editomat can't reduce the word to one it knows, you'll get a message like this:
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The Preferences dialog lets you assign colors to the highlights, modify settings for highlighting items, redefine colors and select or delete comparisons.

The Settings tab allows you to set the font size for the display and control how Editomat chooses text to be highlighted by the Long Sentence, Repeated Word, and Pattern analyses. These values can be modified with the Up/Down buttons, or by typing a new value into the field.

The options supported in this tab are:

Font Size

The default size for text in the main window when Editomat starts.

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Long sentences are not bad, but they slow the reader and can make a piece more difficult to read.

You probably want longer sentences when your hero is relaxing between crisis points and considering how they got where they are and what to do next.

You want short sentences when the action is intense.

Literary works tend to have long sentences, while genre fiction (Romance, Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi) use short sentences.

This analysis highlights sentences that are very long. Decide
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The Word Frequency button generates a report showing how many times each word is used in your document.

By default, only words longer than three characters are counted. This skips "the", "and" "a", and other common words that you probably can't change. The minimum size can be set in the General Preferences dialog.

Left click over a word in the popup will highlight all occurrences of that word in the text window.

Control-Left click over a word in the popup will highlight and view the next occurrence of that word in the text window.

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Parts of Speech

Editomat knows about 35,000 words that are classified by their part of speech (noun, verb, etc). This report shows which words are used in your text, grouped into the part of speech - nouns, verbs, etc, and sorted by number of times used.

This can be used to find overused words.

You can add new words to Editomat's vocabulary with the Extend Parts of Speech Vocabulary entry under the Edit menu.

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Editomat knows about 35,000 words classified by category (happy, sad, musical, mythical, etc).

Editomat may not know the words you need. If you are writing in the speculative fiction, cyber-adventure, or military genres there will be nouns and verbs specific to your needs you'll need to add.

You may even want to add a complete set of words for your genre.

You can extend the words that Editomat knows (and can use to categorize your writing) by:

1. Select the Edit menu.
2. Select Extend Vocabulary.
3. Select appropriate tab.
4. Enter new words, one per line.

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Highlights the words with positive and negative connotation and generates graphs showing:

Word Length based on position

Shows the average word length and standard deviation based on position in the sentence. In a story told from first person, the first word is likely to be shorter than other words in the sentences since so many sentences will start with "I".

Left-Click on this graph will give you a list of the words found at that position in your sentences.

Sentence Lengths

The graph shows the length of each sentence as your piece progresses.

You can use this to find areas where you have groups of sentences that are the same or similar lengths. Sections like that can be repetitive and boring.

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One of Editomat's advanced features is the ability to compare your work to others. You can use this to see if your work matches the style your intended audience expects or to confirm that your writing style hasn't drifted as you wrote your novel.

The default comparisons are one Literary Classic, and three successful modern novels, one Science Fiction, one Romantic Fantasy and one Memoir.

To add more items to compare, load them into the Editomat and then click the Add Compare menu choice under the Edit menu.

To select, deselect, or delete items that Editomat knows about, use the Compare tab of the General Preferences option of the Edit menu.
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You can get synonyms from the main text screen or the Word Frequency pages by

• clicking a word with the right-mouse-button,
• entering the word in lower case in the entry widget and pressing the Find Synonyms button

In either case, after a moment a new window will appear with a list of synonyms for that word.

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Editomat can be placed on your desktop or in a folder you access via a file browser like My Computer, Finder or Nautilus

To start Editomat, just double click the icon.

On Windows you can drag a .txt file over the Editomat icon to start Editomat and open the file.

On Linux you may start Editomat from a command line prompt. If you use the command line, you can include a file to open:
./editomat chapter1.txt

When you edit your work in Editomat's main text, you can save the .txt files with the File/Save or File/Save As menu items.

If you attach Editomat to an MS Word document, you will edit the document in word, and can use MS Word's Save features.

If you Import your text from word and edit it in Editomat's main text window, you can either Export the revised document back into Word, or you can use Editomat's File/Save support to save your work as a text document.

Editomat keeps a list of the last ten files you've edited. These files are saved under the Recent tab. You can reload one of these file by selecting it.

If you have unsaved edits in the current text, you'll be prompted before the data is overwritten.

Weak words consume space without adding any punch to the prose.

Words like very, immediately and that get overused until they lose their meaning.

Clicking the Weak analysis Action Button will find and highlight the weak words.

You don't need to change every highlighted word, but you should consider changing or deleting them.

Find Repeated words.

Sometimes a word will be stuck in your head and you'll use it frequently without realizing it. Even worse, you may use a word that has different meanings in close proximity to each other, confusing a casual reader.

This report highlights words that are repeated within a short distance of each other.

Only words longer than the value for Skip words shorter than are highlighted.

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Many writers have certain patterns that they know they need to watch. It's common to add an apostrophe to a trailing "s", even when the word is plural, not possessive. Words that end with "ing" may need to be replaced with a stronger word.

This feature highlights letters that match a pattern. The patterns include common spelling, word misuse, and word overuse patterns that are worth checking.

The default patterns include "ly", "ing" and "'s".

New patterns can be defined in the General Preferences dialog.
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This analysis does a rudimentary set of checks for adverbs, passive voice, leading clauses, superfluous "that" and missing commas before a 'which' clause.

It highlights the phrases that match the tests with colors defined for Patterns in the Global Preferences dialog.

Left-Control click on the colored rectangle to display the next set of text with an issue.
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Generates a report with various statistics including the number of sentences, word count. average sentence length, average word length.

The report provides Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid scores to reflect how easily read your text is. An adult book has adult content. It need not be written such that it's hard to comprehend without an advanced degree. A light romance or action/adventure should probably be written at a high-school reading level.

Editomat includes lists of words with connotations beyond their meaning. Words like "ugly" have a negative connotation, while words like "pleasure" have positive connotations.

The percentage of these words used can make your overall piece read as
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Editomat knows about 35,000 words that are grouped by their meanings, happy, sad, musical, etc. This report shows which words are used in your text, grouped by their meaning and sorted by number of times used.

This can be used to find overused words, or to see if you are using the jargon your readers will expect.

You can add new words and new classes of words to Editomat's vocabulary with the Extend Vocabulary entry under the Edit menu.

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Editomat knows about 35,000 words. These are classified by their part of speech (noun, verb, etc).

Editomat may not know the words you need. If you are writing in the speculative fiction, cyber-adventure, or military genres there will be nouns and verbs specific to your needs you'll need to add.

You can extend the words that Editomat knows (and can use to categorize your writing) by:

1. Select the Edit menu.
2. Select Extend Parts of Speech Vocabulary.
3. Select appropriate tab.
4. Enter new words, one per line.

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Create a set of reports that compare your work to others. By default, the comparisons are to "Pride and Prejudice", a contemporary memoir, a successful romantic fantasy and a successful science fiction novel, but you can add other works or compare to other works of your own.

The reports include

Sentence Types

Shows the ratio of Compound, Complex and Simple sentences.

Sentence Lengths

A histogram of number of words and how many sentences have those words.

Content-Function

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When not attached to a word document, the Editomat display is a fully functional keypad editor.

Along with common keypad keys, Editomat supports a subset of the emacs control keys.

These keys are supported:

• Ctrl-a - Move to beginning of line
• Ctrl-e - Move to end of line
• Ctrl-f - Move one space forward
• Ctrl-b - Move one space backward
• Ctrl-n - Move down to next line
• Ctrl-p - Move up to previous line
• Esc-f - Move forward one word
• Esc-b - Move backward one word

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