pchapin / writerdaemon

A creative writer's assistant

WriterDaemon

WriterDaemon is intended to be a tool to assist authors of creative works. The precise requirements are a bit vague at the moment but some potential features include

• Analysis of text to obtain statistics such as word count, sentence count, vocabulary lists, etc.

• Spell checking with good support for proper nouns and created words. It would also be nice to have the check sensitive to dialog, perhaps using different or relaxed rules in dialog content.

• Grammar checking?

The primary supported file format will be LaTeX to start but support for other formats such as plain text and ODF would be nice. It is assumed the author is using a version control system so features supported by such systems do not need to be a part of WriterDaemon. On the other hand WriterDaemon should "play nicely" with version control and perhaps interact with it in some useful way.

WriterDaemon is intended specifically to support creative writing. Thus features, such as bibliography handling, are of low priority. On the other hand intelligent handling of dialog is a high priority since dialog is a large component of creative works and often has a very different tone than the surrounding narrative. See the WriterDaemon documentation in the doc folder for more information about the requirements and design of the system.

Build Instructions

WriterDaemon is written in Scala. To build the system you will need the following software installed. The version numbers given are for the specific versions we're using. In most cases other closely related versions would probably also work, but have not been tested.

• Java Development Kit (1.8.0_31)

• Scala (2.11.6)

  It is important that you use a Scala version that matches the major release number mentioned here. For example, using a Scala version such as 2.10.x or 2.12.x will not work. However, any minor release within a major release (the 'x' in the version numbers above) should be fine.

• IntelliJ IDEA (14.1.3)

  We use the Community Edition. You will also need to download and install the Scala plugin from the plugin control panel. You may have to configure IntelliJ to find your Java JDK.

  The WriterDaemon project assumes a suitable Scala SDK has been configured. This can be done from inside IntelliJ by pointing the IDE to the folder where Scala has been installed. The Scala SDK library should be named "scala-2.11." You also need to define a global library named scalatest_2.11-2.1.5 that contains the ScalaTest jar of the same name. The actual location of the jar file is up to you.

  For the scaladoc build to work you need to define SCALA_HOME and SCALATEST_JAR environment variables at the operating system level. The first should point at the folder containing your Scala installation. The second should point at the ScalaTest jar file itself.

  Finally for the WriterDaemon.jar artifact to be correctly built you will need to configure the IntelliJ path variable SCALA_HOME to point at the folder containing your Scala installation.

Once the prerequisites listed above are installed and configured you should be able to open the WriterDaemon project in IntelliJ and build it using the usual menu selections. A build artifact is also defined that generates the WriterDaemon executable jar. Finally an ant build file is provided that allows you to build the scaladoc associated with the project.

Peter C. Chapin
[e-mail]