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Word Processing

Entry 148, on 2005-03-22 at 15:41:06 (Rating 1, Computers)

Years ago, I used to use a word processor quite often, for writing letters to people, for writing documentation, and for recording ideas. Since then I have become a very Internet-centric person. Now I send emails instead of writing letters, I create screen-based documentation, and I record other information at my web site, especially in my blog.

Because of this change I now rarely use a word processor, but I have been known to criticise the leading word processor, Microsoft Word, and am often asked what other word processor I would use, since I didn't use Word.

I have several word processors installed on my computer, and they all have strengths and weaknesses. Microsoft Word certainly does everything, but it is hard to use, unreliable, and badly designed (see a previous blog entry for an extensive tirade on this subject). I have always liked AppleWorks for simple word processing tasks, but it is a very dated program, and missing some critical features. Nisus and Mellel are both very nice, full featured programs but don't seem to read Word documents very well (Mellel doesn't read them at all).

The word processing program I have used most recently is Apple's Pages. This is a new program (Apple just released it a month ago) and is fairly basic at the moment, as far as word processing is concerned, but it is a modern program which interacts with the operating system, and other programs properly. It opens Microsoft Word files well, but doesn't translate some Word features properly.

It does basic word processing well, and has some useful desktop publishing features as well. Because it is a modern Mac OS X (Cocoa) program it has access to Mac OS X's advanced typography services, something that older (Carbon) programs such as Microsoft Word don't utilise as well. I haven't tested this yet, but I would expect the appearance of Pages printed files to look better than Word files because the leading and kerning will be better managed by the Quartz rendering engine.

Pages isn't free, but if you have the chance to try it I would recommend having a look. I hope that Apple will continue to develop it and that in future it will be a useful, full-featured, word processor.

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