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Lightweight Word Processor

Cromulent

Cromulent

macrumors 604
Original poster
Can anyone recommend a lightweight word processor at all? It needs to run under 10.3.9 and work reasonably well on a 333Mhz G3 Powerbook with 192MBs of RAM.
 
I use TextEdit for a lot of my quicker things, It will save in Rich Text File format. Otherwise there is Neo-Office which really is not all that lightweight, but better then office,
 
Cromulent said:
I'm doing a creative writing degree so I will need a fairly full featured word processor.
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Scrivener was featured in MacFormat magazine August 2007 and I believe there is a trial on the DVD. It's available for £17 and they rated it 5 stars.
 
Abiword might be another one...

Or, if I revert to the technical meaning of lightweight... possibly you could use Google Apps?
 
bousozoku said:
Scrivener was featured in MacFormat magazine August 2007 and I believe there is a trial on the DVD. It's available for £17 and they rated it 5 stars.
Click to expand...

It is Tiger only I am afraid otherwise that would have been my first choice (I use it on my Mac Pro).

mkrishnan said:
Abiword might be another one...

Or, if I revert to the technical meaning of lightweight... possibly you could use Google Apps?
Click to expand...

I have used Abiword in the past and never want to repeat that experience again. I couldn't even read what I was typing, the only way I could see the text was to select it. Even ignoring that it would lag while I was typing making it hard to write fast which I find pretty essential.
 
Cromulent said:
... I couldn't even read what I was typing, the only way I could see the text was to select it. Even ignoring that it would lag while I was typing making it hard to write fast which I find pretty essential.
Click to expand...
There must have been a problem with your font installation. AbiWord works perfectly fine here.
 
I've tried both Mariner and Abiword, but eventually settled on Nisus Writer Express. Seemed to me that all three had some features that the others were missing, so it's a matter of which feature set you liked. Ultimately, my decision was based on the fact that I just liked the feel of Nisus Writer's interface better. One of my favorite features, for those days when I want to ignore everything and just write, is full screen mode - everything (menu bar, title bar, toolbars, etc) goes away, you have a blank page, and you just write, and focus on formatting later.

http://www.nisus.com/
 
I'm not sure if it would be considered lightweight, but Mellel is worth a try. The stability is rock-solid, a nice change after using Word.
 
Hmm... OpenOffice's minimum requirements are a bit below what that has, although it might work. (And is free and of course very full featured.) I would assume it would run better than Neooffice (which is just using OpenOffice's code but I think doing kind of a Java implementation rather than x11).

I bet an older OS 9 version of Word might work-maybe Word v.X? Looks like even Word 2001 (for OS 9) has higher system requirements (more RAM anyway).

EDIT: Honestly if those don't work, Text Edit is fairly full featured too if I'm remembering right. I mean it has spell check and basic formatting, so might be good enough to work on from the Powerbook, and then just open it with a full word processor when working on it on a different computer. (Depending on if you're mainly just worrying about the content of it versus fancy formating.)
 
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