Good Free Text Program? (like Pages or MS Word.... only free?)

[Xander562]

Hey, i have a new mac but i dont have any programs to write papers on it. are there any suggestions for a free program?

 

[Applespider]

You'll have TextEdit in your Apps folder which is a basic word processor - depends how 'fancy' you need your papers to be?

 

[iKwick7]

I HIGHLY recommend neo office- it covers everything that ms office does, it's free, and it looks nice.


http://www.neooffice.org/

 

[kgarner]

OpenOffice is good too. A lot of people here prefer NeoOffice since it doesn't require X11, but I like the X11 better as it is more up-to-date and sports a better interface. I personally use Pages, but I have OpenOffice around for the occasional spreadsheet.

 

[emotion]

vi and latex. Old school (and looks nicer for papers).

 

[Frisco]

Writely

Works good in Firefox

 

[godbout]

I would go with NeoOffice or Abiword. They are free and open source. Also, you might be interested in some of the other great free software for OS X. Take a look here:

http://www.opensourcemac.org/

Enjoy!

Edit: Wow that was a lot of replies fast! Anyways I would second LaTex (in the form of TexShop) if you are into that kind of thing... it is VERY valuable to learn and extremely powerful... if you are a physical scientist you essentially need to know how to typeset in LaTex.

 

[zim]

TextEdit, my favorite It uses the system spell check and dictionary. Has formating options, can open word, be used as a plain text editor for html, css, etc.. great little program.

 

[slackersonly]

NeoOffice is great. I have sent 20-30 docs to PC/Word friends with any problems.

 

[Josh]

Writely

Works good in Firefox

I was just about to suggest that.

Owned by Google, Writely is a web-based app for creating documents. It looks pretty neat, if you ask me.