free open source word processor

(I have no idea how good this is. I only know that I know people who use this at home.)

it has to be OS9 compatible. so no openoffice, unfortunately.

there are a couple of options here but i can't vouch for any of them, sadly. iText looks reasonable, but weedy.

Possible reason why open-source contributors are a poor match for word-processing software: AbiWord seems to think the em-dash is some arcane typographical oddity that people will be content to add via an "insert symbol" pull-down. AbiWord doesn't even know what an en-dash is. It's a freaking word processor that has never heard of an en-dash. Google search reveals people in the forums going "umm hey how do you do dashes with this thing?" and other people going "oh, I'm not sure how to resolve your problem," as if wanting to make dashes in a word processor is some sort of strange and challenging PROBLEM.

Okay so umm that said, please recommend a speedy and attractive word processor for Windows! Free or cheapish? Apparently I am much more productive when working with anything other than big, lumbering Word. This is for the sole simple purpose of writing fiction, so no complex functions or layouts are necessary -- just something fast, clean, and attractive that can take in the text, em-dashes and all. (Okay, draft-management functions could be helpful here.)

This is for the sole simple purpose of writing fiction

Entries to ILX then?

I've been pretty happy with OpenOffice while pursuing a Creative Writing-Fiction degree, if that helps at all.

oh and

ysi?

Huh ... tried OpenOffice Writer, but it didn't feel like much of an improvement over Word. Ah well, possibly I should just stick with Word and stop kidding myself that there's some kind of free magical lightweight full-featured word processor just waiting out there for me. (There seem to be some really high-end writer-oriented ones out there, but only for Mac.)

OpenOffice isn't much different than Word, except that it's FREEEEEEEEEE. It ran like shit on my old PC (v1.5), even w/ the OpenOffice System Helping Thing running in the system tray; v2.0, on my fancy new computer, is otay, tho.

I do 90% of my writing in Wordpress & text editors @ work, tho, so what do I know?

Yeah, I would totally appreciate the freeness for sure, but ... I already have Word, so no point switching unless there's some kind of improvement. It's too bad, though -- if not for the incredibly annoying dash/quotes thing, I would be a million times more productive and comfortable drafting stuff in AbiWord.

http://docs.google.com/?action=newdoc&title=

Nabisco, have you tried modifying some of the default settings in Word to make it less cumbersome? It defaults to a lot of annoying stuff, but it's pretty adaptable if you dig into the Preferences.

Note to software developers: anything to requires me to input en- and em-dashes as special characters and cannot do a word count is not a "word processor," it is a text entry box

the answer turned out to be google docs

I still prefer Writer for writing, but I've been using DarkRoom a lot for editing. My concentration tends to wander if my IM client is lurking on the bottom of the screen, DarkRoom helps me stay focused.

it doesnt surprise me that nabisco uses a lot of em-dashes

–

As a human being, I like the idea of open source word processors.

As an editor/designer, I hate them, as people submit articles in formats you can't read, and have to piss away half a day finding software to open/convert/etc their shit. Almost as good as people get you to spend 2 weeks designing something and sending it as a print-ready PDF, then ask, "Can you send me a version I can modify in Word?"

OpenOffice makes it pretty easy to save in a number of different formats, but yeah, total pain in the ass. Then again Office 07 is some shit for the same reason.

LaTeX. Fuck that pussy WYSISYG shit.

Then again Office 07 is some shit for the same reason.

Too true.

TeX. Fuck that pussy LaTeX shit.

nroff ya sissies

vi, luddites

See, one little nerdy nipple-pinch and the whole thing devolves into a wedgie-fest.

You nerds are so predictable.

Why you can't just wire-wrap yr own circuit boards is beyond me. Keyboards are for grannies and prog rockers.

Don't think that I don't see thru that "wire-wrap" bait, faux-nerd.

It's shit that a Microsoft product is the best available offering in such a simple category. Surely it's not hard to write a lightweight word processor that has em dashes.

It's called Pages.

This has been yr snarky Mac nerd moment for today.

In positive thinking news, Excel is still the best spreadsheet available.

Having stolen every good idea from every innovative spreadsheet until the competition had all been bought out or crushed.

xp Yes.

Why the crap is oo.o not yet lightweight? 90 percent of it works properly now.

Having stolen every good idea from every innovative spreadsheet until the competition had all been bought out or crushed.

Still pining for

  % sc

Pages heaves

yeah i'm not too thrilled w/ iwork 08. pages is sloooow and often acts very stupid about stuff like columns and tabs and numbers is just not an easy transition from excel. still can't figure out how relative vs absolute refs work.

like supposedly it should be just like excel but it's always behaving in weird ways. hardly a seamless step over from office 2004 ... and if that's not what apple was shooting for, then apple is stupid

Office Mac 2008 isn't a seamless step over from Office Win 2003 OR Win 2007, so bleh.

Office Mac is fucking hideous in all ways. The Mac really needs a decent word processor bad.

the tabs are especially gross

and pointless! Some folks hate the Ribbon in PC Word, but at least there's a whole idea behind it -- it replaces the toolbar, and organises tools by tasks. The Mac guys decided they needed one, used it for some random charts and bubbles and stars ... and kept the toolbar. mrns.

I like Pages much much more than Word, but Numbers is really far behind Excel still. Granted, I come to Pages with much more of a layout perspective than a word-processing perspective, so my understanding of the issue is surely incomplete. In other words, Pages is to me an easy, simple version of InDesign.

Last I checked, Numbers had no JDBC/ODBC capabilities, nor pivot tables, nor a bunch of other good Excel features I like. Plus, it'll often crash when I feed Numbers an 8MB CSV file.

i want an easy, simple version of pagemaker

MS Paint.

OMG the "scrolling in a background window w/o needing to switch to that window" functionality in Word for Mac is busted

CRITICAL FAIL

lol mac people don't know what a word processor is for! And I think I may almost have to include myself in that group, now that I think of it. The .doc format is not much more than a minor irritation to me, because it's the only way anyone knows how to send me text, and it's such a big bag of bloatation when all I need is two paragraphs of ad copy or happy talk for a web page, which I'm just going to copy and paste anyway. Sometimes they format their two paragraphs in their own favorite font, as if to say, "Oh and by the way, make it look nice. Not like those emails you always send to people with that funny kinda blocky type. What is that? It's so ugly!"

Is it wrong of me to party blame MS Office for all that?

partLy

No.

MS marketing convinces people to spend a fortune on something they don't need, and once they buy it they feel the need to use it for everything.

Yeah, I'm not a writer in much of any capacity, so my words do not need so much processing. Simple spell check and I'm golden. Surely that also describes 90% of people who nonetheless have a Word icon prominent and handy on their desktop. It's not that it's a bad program, it's just that it is purpose built for a purpose that hardly anyone needs. Maybe someday when I write that novel that I just KNOW I have in me...

And then there's Outlook, the monstrous flatulent garbage heap on top of your office network that nobody notices or cares about. IIRC, it defaults to "rich text," which is a whole embedded Word document for every email? Which it then stores in these giant files that you can't do anything with unless... oh, you know the story. At any rate, is what people send to each other in the office really email anymore?

Don't start me on fucking Outlook.

Novels don't really need Word, apart from the indexing and reviewing. This is what I mean about the need for a tool that does basic things and foregoes all the bloatware that comes with Word. I did tech writing for three years and didn't touch 90% of the crap that's buried in there.

hm... yeah... that sounds more right. I haven't used it in a long time for... anything. (Not since lol temping.) It's prolly better to say it's like buying a dairy farm for a glass of milk.

what's the best program for making WORKSHEETS?

i imagine the answer might be same as "best program for making flat-pack furniture assembly instructions"

What sort of worksheet?

this sort (big image)

probably quark xpress, right?

A lot of people still rep for Nisus Writer on the Mac particularly for long documents. It is Mac only but has a much more Mac like interface and much nippier than word (although I have not yet had the pleasure of Word 2008). It is not free or open source, but it is quite cheap.

OpenOffice just seems like an effort to duplicate the Bloat of MS office.

Not sure what I will choose if/when I go back to school but I don't think I will be using office 2004 particularly as it doesn't like spaces that much.

i tried word 08 for about 2 hours and i can report shittiness of epic proportions.

they kept all the worst stuff. i think the one that made me snap was the pull down menu for fonts. i mean, jesus christ, get w/ the program.

they ruined the good stuff. like stet said upthread: they might have made the ribbon do something sensible, like replace floating "inspectors", which are not really as good for word-processing as they are for, say, photo editing, because they block parts of paragraphs and sentences and make the part you're working on hard to understand. instead the ribbon does textart and all the worst tackiest stuff.

also it renders ugly on my computer.

so uh how do i do an em dash other than via autocorrect, folks?

baja: Yeah, some kind of DTP app would be necessary.

Ed: Yeah. Sun just wants an Office clone, really.

baja: Pulldown menu for fonts? wtF???!?? THIS is what I mean about MS trying to make things so simple for dumb people that it breaks stuff.

thomp: If you're using Windows:
- Start + Run + charmap
- copy the em dash and paste it in yer document

just out of curosity, what is it that people want/expect from word processing? as for me, I mainly want transparency - I would rather not be reminded that I'm using an app at all. I used writeroom for a while but it was for lack of a better word theatrical - now I'm about half Mellel and half TextEdit: zero bells zero whistles, essentially a quieter typewriter minus the paper

i was hoping for a quicker trick than charmap. also altcode 151. — — — — !

what I want from a word processor:

Ability to handle styles without the app getting creative on it's own.
Ability not to cause screams of rage when formatting a bulleted or numbered list.

I need a word processor with tracking and collaborative editing, which Microsoft Works on my computer can't do. Can OpenOffice do this?

thomp, not sure if that's a Word question since it's not a Word thread but you mentioned autocorrect, but... if you're using the Windows version of Word and your keyboard has a numeric keypad (guess it must for alt+0151 to work), then hold ctrl+alt and press the keypad - (not the main keyboard one) for an em dash, or just ctrl and - for an en dash.

This may or may not actually feel quicker than alt+0151, or autocorrecting double dashes and having it decide from the spacing what you wanted, or autocorrecting single dashes and having it decide entirely at random what you wanted, and then not doing it in the structurally identical next line, etc etc

can anyone hear explain how to install a template into OpenOffice? I cant find the directory

Novels don't really need Word, apart from the indexing and reviewing. This is what I mean about the need for a tool that does basic things and foregoes all the bloatware that comes with Word. I did tech writing for three years and didn't touch 90% of the crap that's buried in there.

-- Autumn Almanac, Wednesday, 23 April 2008 08:22 (6 hours ago)

Not for tech writing, but for long pieces or a novel: I use Page Four. I've grown very fond of it very fast. It's lean, fast and simple. No clutter in the shape of options you never use and don't want to be bothered with. Searching through your 200 page novel for a snippet of text is extremely fast. Oh, and it's compatible with Word, although I don't know why anyone would want to use Word again after Page Four. Try it, it's good (and no, I don't work for it).

Oh, the notebook options and it's tabbed windows for switching between, say, plot outline and your actual text, is what especially makes it so good.

Pulldown menu for fonts? wtF???!??

Office 04 for Mac has always had this. I don't see how it's any crazier than that window that pops up on the PC version that has three other windows inside it. Although, as I hinted earlier, I kinda wish choosing your font was some special obscure buried option, or that you should have to take a short quiz on basic typography before you are allowed to change the font. The belief that your new and special font makes you the 'creative type' seems very persistent.

Live word count, an interface that gets out the way (ideally full-screen), revision control, optional character and paragraph-level stylesheets (ie with a "No Style" sheet), some sort of reliable reference manager, proper typographic controls, and ideally a file format that lets me get at the text in 20 years' time.

PC Word 2007 is the closest yet, I think, even though it doesn't have half those things!

This looks useful for google docs people :)

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/04/22/gdocsuploader-puts-google-docs-api-to-use/

I don't see how it's any crazier than that window that pops up on the PC version that has three other windows inside it

what's crazy is that if you have a lot of fonts it wastes time and pauses, trying to render all of the fonts even if you're just moving the mouse across the menu bar. so you have to scrupulously avoid crossing the font pull-down. also if you have a lot of fonts it takes a LONG time to scroll down through all of them. it's just a stupid thing.

Ability not to cause screams of rage when formatting a bulleted or numbered list.

oh man, i hear you.

also you can handle text tables as well as a spreadsheet does number tables

More and more off topic, I guess, but has anyone used Font Agent Pro on Windows? I'm just wondering if it's Mac-like as advertised. It's quite a good font manager, even though I've kind of abandoned it since Leopard, since Font Book seems to actually work now.

Not for tech writing, but for long pieces or a novel: I use Page Four. I've grown very fond of it very fast. It's lean, fast and simple. No clutter in the shape of options you never use and don't want to be bothered with. Searching through your 200 page novel for a snippet of text is extremely fast. Oh, and it's compatible with Word, although I don't know why anyone would want to use Word again after Page Four. Try it, it's good (and no, I don't work for it).

-- Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 24 April 2008 00:51 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

Thanks for the tip -- it looks like a great piece of software -- but I don't use Windows or Mac, which leaves me out in the cold a bit.

I'm amazed an open source, platform-agnostic equivalent to this hasn't already been developed. Common sense concept, I'd have thought.