Monday - October 17, 2005
Word processing is so very retro.
It's like saying "Letraset." Or those days when my
producer would splice the "s" from the end of one word and have the audio
technician tape it to the end of another word to make a
plural.
Sometimes I miss Wordstar.
Nowadays, Microsoft Word is everyone's default word processor. We're all used to it. We might not use all the little buttons, but when you need to bang out a press release or an advertorial or a term paper or a report on one thousand and one things you can do with liquid nitrogen, that ubiquitous W is there at your service.
Joey prefers TextEdit. It uses much less memory, and all her copy gets cut-and-pasted into a Freehand document for layout, anyway.
Still, inspired by my adventures with journal programs, I wanted to find out if there was more (or less) to word processing than Word. (Again, PC users will not benefit from this.) So off I went, gobbling bandwidth downloading 30-day demos.
Mellel
From Redlex, Mellel is billed as "the word processor for Mac OS X." Hmmm. Not very catchy. However, the retro-cool typewriter icon and the brushed-steel skin give it that Olympia electric typewriter vibe. (Our old one used to vibrate so assertively the entire table and the floor beneath would hum along with it.)
I opened a Word document directly with Mellel. It imported it with formatting intact, but image missing. They've made a comparison chart here. Long documents that require precise stylesheet control, writers obsessed with hyphenation, and compulsive cross-referencers will find an easier life with Mellel. If you think in two languages (say Hebrew and English), Mellel will let you type left to right and right to left. How's that for scholarly?
Nisus Writer Express
Nisus says this is "the writer's word processor." It's more expensive than Mellel, and comes with a free Nisus Thesaurus. Creepily, the program automatically offers word alternatives as you type. It's like having an English teacher mumbling synonyms in the backseat while you drive the words along at a sputtering 5 kilometers per hour.
Nisus Writer Express opened this Word document directly, with formatting and image intact. My cursor was on the word "welfare;" as you can see, the thesaurus on the right immediately offered "social welfare," "relief," "social insurance" and "dole." For copywriters who are constantly on the lookout for yet another word for "amazing" or "prize," this can be a less painful alternative to banging one's mouse against one's forehead.
Sometimes I miss Wordstar.
Nowadays, Microsoft Word is everyone's default word processor. We're all used to it. We might not use all the little buttons, but when you need to bang out a press release or an advertorial or a term paper or a report on one thousand and one things you can do with liquid nitrogen, that ubiquitous W is there at your service.
Joey prefers TextEdit. It uses much less memory, and all her copy gets cut-and-pasted into a Freehand document for layout, anyway.
Still, inspired by my adventures with journal programs, I wanted to find out if there was more (or less) to word processing than Word. (Again, PC users will not benefit from this.) So off I went, gobbling bandwidth downloading 30-day demos.
Mellel
From Redlex, Mellel is billed as "the word processor for Mac OS X." Hmmm. Not very catchy. However, the retro-cool typewriter icon and the brushed-steel skin give it that Olympia electric typewriter vibe. (Our old one used to vibrate so assertively the entire table and the floor beneath would hum along with it.)
I opened a Word document directly with Mellel. It imported it with formatting intact, but image missing. They've made a comparison chart here. Long documents that require precise stylesheet control, writers obsessed with hyphenation, and compulsive cross-referencers will find an easier life with Mellel. If you think in two languages (say Hebrew and English), Mellel will let you type left to right and right to left. How's that for scholarly?
Nisus Writer Express
Nisus says this is "the writer's word processor." It's more expensive than Mellel, and comes with a free Nisus Thesaurus. Creepily, the program automatically offers word alternatives as you type. It's like having an English teacher mumbling synonyms in the backseat while you drive the words along at a sputtering 5 kilometers per hour.
Nisus Writer Express opened this Word document directly, with formatting and image intact. My cursor was on the word "welfare;" as you can see, the thesaurus on the right immediately offered "social welfare," "relief," "social insurance" and "dole." For copywriters who are constantly on the lookout for yet another word for "amazing" or "prize," this can be a less painful alternative to banging one's mouse against one's forehead.