What's the best wordprocessor for MacOSX-Tiger?

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
In about a few weeks, I'm gonna purchase, after 18 months without a mac, a new imac-G5, if God will.



I want to use it most of the time for writing articles and books, so I need a real good wordprocessor that offers among others these features:



1. The most important feature is at the same time the most basic feature, namely perfect WYSIWIG. The text on screen should really look like the text printed, format, lining, space, ... must be equal.



2. Reliability, that it doesn't crash, that it doesn't forget formats or styles or mixes or changes anything... There is nothing worse than writing for half an hour and then to lose what you wrote in that time due to a crash of the app, and apps that corrup their own files, even when already saved are also a pain.

The app should easily cope with hundreds of pages in the same document.



3. A good footnotes-support with numbering and astericks, columns-support, wordcount-system, a RTF-export-possibility, PDF-saving-option, ... but what I don't want are all these auto-correction- or auto-completing-systems..



4. Ease-of-use. I don't want to lose time, fighting with the app on how to do a thing. The app should be compatible with Tiger and use the Aqua-interface.



5. The price for it shouldn't exceed a hundred dollar.



What's your advice, what's the best wordprocessor for MacOSX -Tiger that fulfills this small list of wishes and more?



Nightcrawler

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Nightcrawler

    In about a few weeks, I'm gonna purchase, after 18 months without a mac, a new imac-G5, if God will.



    I want to use it most of the time for writing articles and books, so I need a real good wordprocessor that offers among others these features:



    1. The most important feature is at the same time the most basic feature, namely perfect WYSIWIG. The text on screen should really look like the text printed, format, lining, space, ... must be equal.



    2. Reliability, that it doesn't crash, that it doesn't forget formats or styles or mixes or changes anything... There is nothing worse than writing for half an hour and then to lose what you wrote in that time due to a crash of the app, and apps that corrup their own files, even when already saved are also a pain.

    The app should easily cope with hundreds of pages in the same document.



    3. A good footnotes-support with numbering and astericks, columns-support, wordcount-system, a RTF-export-possibility, PDF-saving-option, ... but what I don't want are all these auto-correction- or auto-completing-systems..



    4. Ease-of-use. I don't want to lose time, fighting with the app on how to do a thing. The app should be compatible with Tiger and use the Aqua-interface.



    5. The price for it shouldn't exceed a hundred dollar.



    What's your advice, what's the best wordprocessor for MacOSX -Tiger that fulfills this small list of wishes and more?



    Nightcrawler




    If you want a cheap, full-featured word processor that uses Aqua, go with AbiWord. It is free. It opens files in Word, WordPerfect, RTF, HTML, etc. formats. It can save in Word, RTF, HTML, LaTex, etc.. Please don't ask about PDF again. Every MacOS X application that prints can produce PDF files.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Nightcrawler



    1. The most important feature is at the same time the most basic feature, namely perfect WYSIWIG. The text on screen should really look like the text printed, format, lining, space, ... must be equal.





    Why do you need perfect WYSIWIG for your articles and books, are you going to be self-publishing them (as PDFs perhaps)?
  • Reply 3 of 10
    banchobancho Posts: 1,517member
    Mellel is really nice. Also, since you can now opt between Aqua and brushed metal for the interface, most people here have lost their only objection to it.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    Well, since AppleWorks could do all those things you want (though some were not so intuitive) ... I'd have to assume that iWorks is capable as well (though Ive never used it).

    Get MS Word for Mac at an education price and it would do everything you want it to do.

    PERFECT wysiwyg may be hard to come by without carefull formatting if you are creating rather complex pages ... for basic text, all Mac wp's seem to be fairly good at it.
  • Reply 5 of 10
    djmbdjmb Posts: 120member
    Pages (iWork word processor) is excellent
  • Reply 6 of 10
    Quote:

    Originally posted by djmb

    Pages (iWork word processor) is excellent



    I hate Pages personally, but I don't have anything constructive to add since I mostly just use TextEdit :P



    But yeah, most word processor's have trial versions, so try some of those out.
  • Reply 7 of 10
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Word 5.1 in Classic.
  • Reply 8 of 10
    Thanks all for the input, I appreciate it very much.



    I have done a bit of research into that topic, too, and found that most of these opensource-apps are in a constant "Beta-modus", therefore not really reliable.



    As to other wordprocessors, I found that alot of people liked these wps: Nisus Writer Express 2.1, Mellel 1.9 and Marine Writer, but some also liked Pages.



    Which one of these is the best for MacOSX in your opinion, regarding reliability, WYSIWYG-support, footnotes, ease of use, and the ability to easily handle hundreds of pages in one document, with all the footnotes... an integrated outliner would be nice, but is not a must.



    As to MS Word, I had very bad experiences as to reliability and curruptness and general abuse of the system it runs on, that I don't even want to think about that again.



    Thanks for the help.



    Nightcrawler
  • Reply 9 of 10
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,561member
    Nisus Writer Express is the OS X version of Nisus Writer which has a long history on the Mac and much used by writers. I don't write book length documents but I use it a fair amount. It has an option to autosave as often as you like though I have never seen it crash. If you do some google searches you should be able to find some extended reviews. I recall one series where an author wrote a critique of NWE as he wrote his book.
  • Reply 10 of 10
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    I like NWE a lot. I think it has the nicest interface of any word processor I have ever used. But since Nightcrawler seems to put a premium on lack of bugs, NWE might not be the best choice. The last couple papers I have written I wrote in NWE and then imported into Pages to print out the final copy. While writing in NWE is a pleasure, there are wierd glitches (like the indenting of the last lines of paragraphs) that prevented me from getting output that would be acceptable to submit to a journal.
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