[DM-MUG] words and pages

[Darcy Baston]

When having to work with Microsoft docs (Word, Excel and Powerpoint), 
my app of choice is NeoOffice, which is an OS X port of OpenOffice that 
doesn't depend on X11. It installs like any other word processor. It 
offers the best compatibility I've seen yet. My publisher and I back 
and forth documents, her on MS Office for PC, me on NeoOffice, and 
we've yet to hit a snag.

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php

My favorite text editor is TextWrangler. Although BareBones have made 
Version 2 free, version 1.5 (registration only at the time) is MUCH 
faster. 15 megabyte text files (web logs) open in 3 seconds on version 
1.5, vs. 250+ seconds in version 2.

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml

I love plain text editing on the Mac. Heck, when I was emulating OS 
7.5.5 on an Amiga 1200 in the mid 90s (what brought me to Macdom), my 
favorite app to launch was BBEdit lite. My hard drive is consistently 
full of more .txt files than .rtf, .doc, .cwk etc., still, 10 years 
later. There's just a down to earth frills-free feeling to writing text 
unformatted. To me it's the closest approximation to handwriting 
without missing the benefits of technology.

There's that, and it lets me search my hard drive by content a LOT 
easier!

My favorite outlining tool (creating book/essay structures before 
drafting begins) is currently Appleworks 6. You can quickly promote an 
demote bulleted/numbered ideas with hotkeys. I've yet to find out if 
Pages has retained this functionality. I plan on getting Pages anyway, 
since it's an affordable substitute for InDesign/Quark for some of my 
non-professional projects. However, you'd be hard pressed to complain 
about the quality Pages churns out from what I've demoed at the Apple 
store.

I love printing to PDF though. :) I've had a paperless office for about 
5 years now, thanks to text/PDF technology!

warm wishes,
Darcy

On Jan 26, 2005, at 12:04 PM, John Kisner wrote:
>
> Between Word and Text Editors is a really exciting and eclectic array 
> of choices.  AppleWorks was my program of choice for years, but it has 
> not aged well.  Under OS X it does not seem to do a very good job 
> choosing the correct gutter between columns, and I've also had some 
> printing issues.  My quest was to find something that "wasn't Word" 
> but worked better than AppleWorks.