What is the best word processing software for an author? What is the character limit per Word file?

manuscripts to be submitted in MS Word. As far as I know, there really isn't a character limit for Word--or if there is, you aren't going to be able to easily reach it. I've created manuscripts of 150,000 words--well over a million characters--books that were around 1000 pages in large formats when they came off press. In general, publishers want your manuscript in a standard format with very little in the way of formatting, because when they run the text into a pagelayout program, they'd have to strip out the styling, anyway. When I turn a MS over to the publisher, I provide word documents for the title page, preface and table of contents, a separate file for each chapter, all in size 12 type, double spaced, with 1 inch margins on all side, and the title of the book, chapter and page numbers, and author names in the footers and headers. My co-author and I use end-notes rather than using the footnote system, as it can confuse page layout programs. Go online and look at publoisher ...  more