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This documentation begins with starting Editomat and covers the simple and common operations and then the more complex ones.

Feel free to skip to a topic that interests you.


Editomat Overview
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
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Loading a file
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:


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Attaching Editomat to an MS Word document
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.
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Bleaching away highlights
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.

Finding Better Words
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.
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Customizing Editomat to your needs
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
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Identifying long sentences

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.


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Word Frequency reports


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.
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Reporting Word usage by Part of Speech

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.


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Adding a new type of word
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.


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Sentence Statistics
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


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Adding your own works for comparison
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.
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More Synonyms
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
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Starting Editomat

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.


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Saving your changes
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,
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Recently used files
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.
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Finding Weak Words

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.


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Finding words that are Repeated Repeatedly

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
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Finding patterns in your work

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.


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Potentially un-useful constructions

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
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Statistical reports

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
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Word Usage by Type of word
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
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Adding new words to Editomat's vocabulary
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
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Comparing your work to others
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.


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Editing in the Editomat main screen
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

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