Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Looking for a new word processor

As you may have noted from some of my recent posts, I use iWork's Pages word processor quite a bit. I like it because it's very easy to use, and the resulting documents look very good. Unfortunately, I've reached a point where I'm finding it to be too cumbersome for what I want to do. It's too limited in its charting capabilities (their "my way or the highway" attitude to formatting, and no log scale option on the x-axis, ya gotta be kidding!), which means that I have to create charts in some other program and then copy/paste them into Pages. If I need to make a change in the chart then I have to go back and redo the chart, copy/paste, etc. The same thing with equation editing. Pages doesn't have one, so I have to go into LaTeXiT, create the equation, copy/paste. The last document that I created has 49 charts, and over 120 equations. Most of them have been edited several times.
One option is to use LibreOffice. It's not bad. Certainly more powerful. It has a built-in equation editor, and more sensible linking of its charts to LibreOffice spreadsheets. But I find it very cumbersome to use, to the point that I don't see much advantage over the copy/paste hell that I have to endure in Pages. On top of that, I don't much care for the way LibreOffice documents look. There's something not quite right about their font metrics. And the equations produced by its equation editor are very ugly compared to what can be done with LaTeX formatting.

So, I'm looking for word processor suggestions, from people who create documents similar to mine, lots of charts and equations.

I like the lightweight editors by BareBones Software. BBEdit (paid) and TextWrangler (free, basically BBEdit Lite)

They have specific supports for programmers, including automatic syntax coloring, (open an HTML document! and see!) and can do a regexp search. (love that)

In the free or very low cost bracket take a look at OpenOffice or LibreOffice variants of the same open source code base. For very large documents Ulysses or Scriviner are outstanding and will accept almost any graphic or chart elements from a wide variety or applications. Even better, with Ulysses or Scriviner you can produce a wide variety of document types and formats from the same source material with only a few keystrokes allowing the author to focus on content not format and layout.

Thanks for the suggestions. I did run across some reviews of Scrivener in my searches, but didn't have a chance to check it out. I've now had a closer look and it looks very promising.

I'm also looking at Mellel, which appears to be aimed at the kind of things I do.

It's nice to see that these all have free trial versions, so I can check them out.

The determining factor will be how well they handle imported graphics.

One unfortunate thing is that equation editing has to handled by an external application, which is more expensive than the word processor (twice as much!). That's too bad, because LaTeXiT (which is free) does beautiful equation formatting, but none of these word processors appear to support it.

I have been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but primarily for the spreadsheet. In my first post on this topic I mentioned that the advantage of these was that it is possible to hot link from a word processor document to a chart on a spreadsheet. However, my statement appears to be premature. Apparently, this feature doesn't work, and there doesn't appear to be any timeline for it to be fixed.

I had more luck with NeoOffice than LibreOffice, but it's still as cumbersome as MS Office. Then when I got Pages, I switched.

Since most of my word processing needs are simple, most often I use Tex-Edit Plus, a program that has been around forever. It's my work hourse. You can make a $15 donation, which I highly recommend, but it isn't crippled in any way. Most of all I like it's text cleanup, sorting, and search and replace (including grep searches), plus support for Applescript and Automator. I don't know why more people don't use this program, particularly considering the backlash against bloat. Tex-edit Plus is fast, small, and never crashes.

http://www.tex-edit.com/

For many years, Mac writer Charles Moore has been a big fan.
http://www.lowendmac.com/misc/07/0205.html

As it happens I've been using Tex-Edit Plus for many years. It's a great text editor, and I highly recommend it. But it is a text editor, rather than a word processor, and there is a notable difference.

BTW, One unfortunate thing in particular about Tex-Edit Plus is that it can't handle characters other than ACSII. If you try to work with Unicode characters, then it pukes. I really hope they fix this, because I like Tex-Edit Plus. But I need the ability to use characters that have codes >255 ASCII.

I second deniro's comment about NeoOffice. I don't know why I didn't mention it in my previous post. If you have been using Word NeoOffice should not be too cumbersome to use. However IMHO Microsoft Word, NeoOffice, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice are ill suited to the production of documents over 30 to 50 pages. That does not mean they are not often abused for that purpose, just that is not their forté. For the big stuff I still recommend:

1. Ulysses or Scrivener when your focus is on content not format. Neither has builtin formula capability, but they will handle PDF or almost any graphic format output from a formula app.
2. Mellel a true Word Processor for serious documents.
3. If $€£¥¢₽ is no object and you will take the time to learn how to use it then Adobe InDesign is great, but you would still need a Word Processor or editor to produce content for InDesign.

I guess that leaves Nisus.

I have used NeoOffice as well. In fact it was my favourite of the OpenOffice bunch, because they were the first to develop a native Mac user interface. But after OpenOffice released their improved Mac interface, there didn't seem to be any advantage to NeoOffice anymore, and I was a bit put off by their refusal to let anyone post in their forum unless they had paid them money within the previous few months.

I was waiting for someone to mention Nisus. I seem to recall that one of the members here had mentioned some time in the past that they use it.

I used Nisus for a few years and I liked it. Nisus is clean, fast, has a reasonable learning curve, and easy to use. I no longer use Nisus for my work because its layout capability and features were not up to the task. It is great for letter writing and short or modest documents but IMO it is not up to large, complex documents or graphic intense documents. Harking back to your initial post, I think you would be better served by Pages than Nisus.

The OpenOffice variants offer the distinct advantage of built in graphics, spreadsheets, charting, databases, report building, and creating mathematical formulas, which would appear to be a significant advantage for your work. To be honest, I have not used any of the OpenOffice variants to create a large document, so I don't know how well they would handle that. Choosing between the three in my experience NeoOffice has the best integration with OS X functionalities and is perhaps a bit faster, LibreOffice has the most pleasing GUI, and OpenOffice itself "feels" the clunkiest. NOTE: Report building is omitted in the current release of NeoOffice because of security vulnerability issues. All three variants require Java for some functions.

eh, just use pico/nano and be done with it.

Vi???????

That's really not a useful response given the OP's clearly stated requirements.

No problem. In fact, I typically use a simple text editor (either Tex-Edit Plus or Apple's TextEdit) to do the bulk of the writing, because it's less cumbersome. And then I paste it into the more unwieldy word processor for final editing and formatting. I'm finding that Pages has such a slow user interface, that it's quite easy for me to type too fast for it to keep up.

I recently co-wrote a long article with a non-Mac user, and the only sensible choice was to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Its math formula editor is very good. Not quite up to the level of LaTeX, but still pretty good. I just find it very unfortunate, that they haven't managed after all these years of development to get their embedded objects to work. If that ever happens then it will be the clear choice for me.

Meanwhile, based on the comments here, and what I've gleaned elsewhere, I'm going to check out Mellel. It may be the closest to what I'm looking for.

sorry I was having problems finding the [sarcasm] tag

and your detector needs recalibrating

My experience exactly.

Today I needed to do page numbering in Pages (3.0.3), which I don't often do, and I had to re-learn it. Why didn't I learn it the first time? Because it sucks. So complicated and cumbersome. First I looked in the Help menu, then my Pages manual .pdf, then watched a video on Youtube which applied to later versions.

There must be a program that does a better job of handling page numbering.

Many years ago when I used Appleworks and WordPerfect I don't recall have the same amount of trouble.

ETA: Search/replace in Tex-Edit Plus is far better than in Pages, where as far as I can tell it doesn't even work properly.

I know everyone has their reasons for running (now unsupported?) older operating systems, but some things do get better with time. Specifically, page numbering in Pages (currently version 5.x). To insert a page number you go to the menu Insert and choose Page Number. That's it. The end. If you happen to click in a header or footer first, a pop-up appears offering to insert the page number. Both methods have options to insert just the page number or page # of #.

So to answer your question of a what is a program that does a better job than Pages 3.0.3 of handling page numbering, it's Pages 5.6.1. There are probably others too.

Interesting. I thought I had to use footers. But when I insert a page number at the bottom, it appears right beneath the text. I need space between page numbers and text. Can I do that without footers?

The point of footers or headers is to carry over from page to page the same information. In the case of page numbering, it will automatically increment the count.

If you don't use footers, then the page number is just ordinary text that increments every time you use it, but you will have to manually insert it on every page. I tested it with the following on one page:

xxxxxx

xxx page 1 xxxx

The numeral "1" was the result of "Insert Page Number" and it could be anywhere on the page; everything else was text I typed. I then "Return"-ed to create a second page and the number count did not show up anywhere until I did another "Insert Page Number" on the new page.

Why avoid footers/headers?

If I create a footer, then I choose Insert Page number, even on page two, page one gets "1" printed on it, which of course I don't want. How do I get rid of that "1" without affecting the automatic numbering on the other pages?

On the Pages 5.6.1 tool bar click on the Document icon then the Section tab. Under that you will see Headers & Footers and below that an option labeled Hide on first page of section. Below that is Page Numbering where you can specify the page numbering style desired.

That should achieve what you are looking for.

Not on Pages 3. I have the Inspector, under Layout, the Section column with two parts: Page Numbers (upper) and Configuration (lower).