Lean Word Processor Specifics
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2001.02.28
After Low End Mac published my piece about the lack of lean word processors for Mac
OS X, I received several emails from readers pointing me towards
existing and future products that might fulfill my needs.
Initially I wanted to be a good sport and write this follow up with
the only OS X word processor (well, word processing module) in
existence, AppleWorks 6, but then I discovered a very big bug. In spite
of the move to Mach, BSD, and OpenStep, this very old Macintosh bug
still wasn't squashed: the letters had variable spaces between them - a
very unpleasant sight (see AppleWorks 6 sample below and note how
characters run into each other).
There isn't any way to avoid this bug when using Mac OS 9.
WordPerfect tries to fix it while you type, but it still isn't a very
pretty sight. Apple must have dropped the ball somewhere in the past
decade, because my a 14 year old Mac Plus running System 6.0.8 with
the TrueType extension doesn't generate this problem at all and
delivers more or less WYSIWYG.
Two rather limited Cocoa-based text-editors displayed fonts
beautifully, though, so I guess it is a Carbon problem.
Well, let's start discussing the emails I got from readers. One of
the things I wrote in my first piece was that the only carbonized word
processor around, AppleWorks 6, could not save as anything but
AppleWorks 6. One of the readers, a Mr. Mortensen, wrote me this was no
longer the case since Apple released update 6.0.4. AppleWorks can now
save as RTF. This is, of course, a far cry from the conversion
possibilities this program used to have, but since RTF is the most
common exchange format, at least it makes AppleWorks useful again in a
real world situation.
Mr. Mortensen also pointed me to the fact that Nisus is moving Nisus
Writer to OS X, and Star Office is also on it's way.
I might give Nisus a try when they deliver. Maybe it has grown more
stable since the last time I tried it (years ago). I heard they are
gonna do a Cocoa port, so it must turn out quite right. Star Office is
a Sun product. I never had the opportunity to use it, because they
failed to produce a Mac version earlier. Bad thing. I don't think we
should forgive Sun for this. At least Microsoft put some effort into
porting it's stuff to the Mac.
Talking of Microsoft, another reader wrote that I was not telling
the truth about MS Word when I said that this program still wasn't able
to print backwards and remember the cursor location. He turned out to
be right. Somewhere hidden under a button on the print window is an
option to print backwards, and command-option-Z will take your cursor
to the place it was the last time you saved and closed the document.
This is all very nice, but what I really want is the cursor to
automatically jump to the last location, just like most of the other
word processors. I don't want to have to learn all kinds of weird key
combinations in order to be able to use a computer program. I am a Mac
user, remember?
Other people wrote me about a text editor already available for Mac
OS X: Tex-Edit plus. I tried it, but it is not a word processor, and it
doesn't posses the basic features even a lean word processor needs in
order to be usable (see the bottom of this article for a summary). It
also crashed a lot. Another text editor, FarText Gold, was actually
pretty good. It is the one program I would recommend for now when
looking for a lean OS X word processor.
I also got an email from an actual developer, Marc Zeedar, who
created the world's first nonlinear word processor, Z-Write. It's a 1.0
product, but it looks pretty promising, and Marc wants to build an OS X
Version of Z-Write before the summer. This shouldn't be too difficult,
since he wrote it with REALbasic, so it's just a matter of recompiling.
He is also planning a future Cocoa version, and that will be the most
interesting one, because of the Carbon font bug.
For all of you people who are thinking about developing a lean word
processor for OS X, I have the following to say: Try to get your hands
on a copy of a discontinued word processor called WriteNow. Study it
closely, because this is how a lean word processor should work. It
is the best program ever written. And the wonderful thing is that
this program was originally developed by NeXT, so I guess you'll get
quite close when developing with the Cocoa-tools (a must!).
A lean word processor needs to do the following:
- save as RTF and HTML (at the least)
- remember the cursor location
- print backwards (last page first)
- spellcheck (system wide available in OS x)
- find/replace
- count the words of a complete document or a selection
- have a ruler
- insert headers, footers, footnotes, and endnotes
- insert a page break
- insert another document or a picture
- have separate font, size, and style menus.
- optionally show "invisible" characters.
- offer a page view option.
- change the view size (very important now that we work on bigger and
bigger screens)
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