anti aliasing inword processors on ibook and pb 12"

[kidA]

so i'm planning on buying a 12" ibook or pb soon and there's one thing really holding me back. i was playing with both the appleworks word processor and microsoft word on the ibook. the fonts look terrible. i do a lot of word processing what with writing research and other papers. the fonts are unacceptable. i tried changing font smoothing in os preferences but it didn't seem to help. it's easy to turn off anti-aliasing within the app, but un-anti-aliased fonts look almost as bad. is there some way to change the antialiasing settings to make them look better? at first i thought it was just the screen, but the fonts in textedit on the same machine look very smooth and are fantastic. the fonts in aw and ms word look a little better on the larger screens of the emac, 14" ibook, and the imac. but they still don't look great. i'd rather not buy another word processor, and don't mention openoffice because it has other problems that make it unacceptable (like x11). anyone know what's up with this? any suggestions?

 

[HexMonkey]

AppleWorks uses a different antialiasing method than most OS X applications. Basically, it's very out of date at the moment (6.0 was released in early 2000 I think, and it was Apple's first carbon application), so it doesn't take advantage of new technologies. Hopefully Apple will surprise us with a new version soon.
I'm not sure about Word, as I don't have it, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was just M$ trying to use their own standards.
There are plenty of other good text editors around though, but I won't try naming any because I don't know exactly what you want to do with them, what features you want etc.