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wPod

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 19, 2003
1,654
0
Denver, CO
Im looking for some sort of publishing software that is a bit above M$ office. I am currently working on a report for a class and with numerous graphics and tables and charts, and well M$ word is just butchering everything up. So, I am wondering if there is some freeware app out there that might work for doing page layouts or such. Or even something that was included with the mac that might do the trick that i just dont know about! Thanks for your help!
 

DXoverDY

macrumors 6502a
Apr 19, 2005
810
0
wPod said:
Im looking for some sort of publishing software that is a bit above M$ office. I am currently working on a report for a class and with numerous graphics and tables and charts, and well M$ word is just butchering everything up. So, I am wondering if there is some freeware app out there that might work for doing page layouts or such. Or even something that was included with the mac that might do the trick that i just dont know about! Thanks for your help!

i've not used it for this, but i hear Pages is really great at doing this sort of thing. i think you can get iWork (Pages + Keynote) for $50 as a student. pretty cheap .. keynote alone is worth the price.
 

Epicurus

macrumors 6502
Apr 28, 2005
394
0
Minneapolis, MN
For simple text editing Word still dominates, even on the Mac. If you have a more complicated technical document with figures, graphs, etc. I'd recommend taking the time to learn LaTeX. There are several great Mac apps that ease you into the world of TeX such as TeXShop and iTeXMac that have pretty good GUIs and good output. For really graphically intense documents that border on graphic design works rather than text documents, you might have to pay for a full program. Pages looks to be a M$ Publisher contender if and when Apple finishes writing the program (the iWork '05 version is disappointing, hopefully Pages 2 will be better).

In the long run LaTeX is a good skill to have. Eventually TeX will give way to a more mature and robust XML document type but that could take years.
 
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