Any ideas on the best novel manuscript formatting software?

(Also hoping to find one that allows the adding of graphical embellishments and illustrations to the text)

Many thanks for any thoughts

Just as a format? Or is there a final target output like PDF or some ebook type?

What types of features are you hoping or needing? Maybe two-column like some bibles? Or just paragraphs? Do you need footnote references? Specific types of formatting? Strikeout? Italics? Bold? Underscore? What genre of book is it? (Story/Novel? How-to book? Tutorials/technical? Reference?)

Personally to start i'd either do basic Wordpad with RTF, OpenOffice writer, or just use a webpage editing software of old to make the shape/formatting and unneeded stuff can be regex'd out later.

Depends how insane and fastidious you want to be.
For personal writing or first drafts, I use a distraction free editor like WordGrinder or FocusWriter. Keep everything out of the way until I'm done with it. Don't worry about editing or spelling until later.

But for you, wanting those fancy embellishments, have you considered driving yourself insane with LaTeX? There's also Typst, R Markdown, Groff, and several others.

(Also, readers: Don't use OpenOffice, that's an obsolete suggestion; OpenOffice was discontinued in 2011. Use LibreOffice for future recommendation.)

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

A review (you can skip the first paragraphs until "But I digress"):
https://pauljmiller.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/review-of-scrivener-as-a-note-taking-program/

Ultimately I'd prefer software that can export in multiple formats for various publishing options (physical, eBooks, etc.).

I'm hoping to move a novel in Open Office (word processor) over to a more specific formatting software. I'm also hoping to add my illustrations to the text (ie G.R.R. Martin's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms). Haven't heard of any of these. Thank you. Will take a look! Thanks. Yes, I had heard of Scrivener, but hadn't been aware it was also for PC. Will take another look.

I remember someone I know well ran into the length limit of Wordpad, Annoying to lose a whole chapter due to ******** bad software. This was around the turn of the millenium though.

Turn of the millennium, you still had windows 98/ME and windows was running on usually 64Mb or less... not really counting Virtual Memory.

In 20010 when tried to do a very large image for primes found the limit of the image was about 16k in each direction, so i can easily see limits being stuck there. But for word? Hmmm i'd wonder how the formatting was in it.

16bit limitations would have suggested 65,536 characters. Add formatting, probably it's own table/entry so it doesn't take up extra space for the 90% of text that's untouched. I can see they might raise it to say 24bit (16Mb) but that's a REAAAALLY long text document. A bit too long. An average softbook fiction book is probably 200-300k and usually under 300 pages.

The main reason to put limitations is either register limits (16bit for example to 32k or 64k blocks) or so when it tries to allocate more memory it doesn't crash outright, especially with such limited memory at the time. In programming C you'd have malloc, then you'd have realloc. Malloc allocates space, realloc tries to extend the space if it can without moving it (if there's empty space at the end). But when you exceed say half the memory of the space, there's a chance it could crash outright, as it can't allocate a larger block and move the data then free the older block.

Another way around it is if it internally splits the file into chunks and then navigates the chunks, and only when you export does it rebuild it to a single file, so you'd have several 100k blocks or something, or some arbitrary thing like 100 pages of data, pictures and formatting. Not long ago when i was converting a bunch of ebooks, i found one that converts between like 10 formats, i usually exported as htmlx (just html but in a zip file).

But other than the container type, it's either going to be images (comicbook like), or likely some type of html so it uses a normal browser to display everything.

PDF i've heard is a stripped down limited version of Postscript (language for printers) and while popular it's hard to switch between formats, so it's best as a final product. But you probably won't be editing in PDF.

For now just go with Open Office Writer, it has a lot of features like if you use headers for each chapter, it can generate a TOC for you. Should export to html and most other formats fairly easily.

It was Wordpad, that simpler text editing programme included with Windows for free. I suspect a lot of people never knew about it as everyone just got Word. Out theory was the limit was artificial as to push people towards the paid programme, aka Word.

Could be. Though i don't see a point in a limit of text size, as the sheer limit of only doing txt rtf and maybe htm files as a huge limitation by itself, especially if the corporate environment demands you use xls files or use microsoft access.

I think WordPad was a replacement for 'write' which was in Windows 3, which basically was notepad but you could change your font with the new TrueType fonts (A big thing at the time) and add a couple basic formatting features.

But i'm sure WordPad was more than sufficient for 99% of people.

I know a point! It's because the app is a barely upconverted 16 bit app. Same thing with Notepad until some time ago~

Realloc can and will move memory just fine if it cannot extend the current allocation. And if it can't, there's no reason it should crash (though admittedly most software is crap and will throw its hands up in the air as soon as alloc fails). It returns NULL, and the program can inform the user about the problem & make it possible to at least save their work and try continue after freeing up some RAM.

I'm referring to a case where it is logically impossible.

Let's talk 16 bit, you have say a 40k block of data but you need to extend 2k, If there's no memory used after the 40k, you just extend 2k and you're done, adjust the free memory sections and all is well. But if that isn't free, then first you allocate 42k, 42+40 = 82k... from 64k memory (Yes 186/286 had segments allowing 64k access to theoretically 1Mb of memory, but other systems like 8bit computers or 8088 didn't have that)....I think you can see what i'm meaning.

Course if virtual memory can pack the data away to the hard drive, clear the memory, allocate it, then reload it, then sure... but i doubt that is the method used. Though i do remember an ex her paint program getting stuck and doing nothing, we figured we'd give it some time to clear whatever was up, and eventually it was indeed fixed...

Still no reason to crash. If you can't provide the RAM, then you let the caller know. No reason you can't extend at the beginning. You won't need double the ram as long as there's a contiguous chunk where the existing allocation can be moved to; this may overlap the old allocation. And the program could be using indirect addressing, allowing other allocations to be moved around to make room. 8088 can address 1MB of RAM too. To the best of my knowledge, 64KB limitation was never a thing on PC, and it is indeed entirely normal for e.g. 8-bit architectures to be able to address more than 256 bytes of memory. Well, there have been computers far more limited than IBM PC, and on these programmers indeed had to use various techniques to make large files workable -- with or without virtual memory. You could easily work with a large text file on small address space if you just don't try to load it all in RAM at once but load chunks from disk (or tape!) as needed and flush them out when not needed.