MacBooks and word processing

[gockemtoad]

Hi there. I'm not sure where to post this, or whether this is just me being picky, but I have query concerning word processors and the Mac. I used to have a Dell laptop and used OpenOffice on that to write most of my stuff. For the purposes of using the new BBC iPlayer, I switched on my old Dell and had to go through all the pain of Windows for it - bad show BBC - but looked through my old text files and realised that the old PC (it's a 4 year old Dell Latitude) was much better at just handling my text documents.

I switched to a Mac a few months back and am impressed with all the stuff I can do with it - except simple word processing. Is it just me, or is NeoOffice really sluggish? Fonts seem to be a bit higgelty-piggelty when rendered on screen and take a wee while to zip around when scrolling. It kinda annoys me that my powerful Macbook isn't good enough for simple word processing. I downloaded the new version of Pages and noticed that wasn't exactly speedy (although fonts were rendered more accurately). I've used Bean, but this also seems to have a fonts problem.

Does anyone else have the problems? Have I done something wrong with my Macbook installation?

 

[techlover828]

Hi there. I'm not sure where to post this, or whether this is just me being picky, but I have query concerning word processors and the Mac. I used to have a Dell laptop and used OpenOffice on that to write most of my stuff. For the purposes of using the new BBC iPlayer, I switched on my old Dell and had to go through all the pain of Windows for it - bad show BBC - but looked through my old text files and realised that the old PC (it's a 4 year old Dell Latitude) was much better at just handling my text documents.

I switched to a Mac a few months back and am impressed with all the stuff I can do with it - except simple word processing. Is it just me, or is NeoOffice really sluggish? Fonts seem to be a bit higgelty-piggelty when rendered on screen and take a wee while to zip around when scrolling. It kinda annoys me that my powerful Macbook isn't good enough for simple word processing. I downloaded the new version of Pages and noticed that wasn't exactly speedy (although fonts were rendered more accurately). I've used Bean, but this also seems to have a fonts problem.

Does anyone else have the problems? Have I done something wrong with my Macbook installation?

try neooffice

 

[Dimwhit]

try neooffice

Read the second paragraph.

In my experience, NeoOffice is fairly sluggish. There are other free word processors out there, though.

 

[Angrist]

If you're just doing text ... TextEdit is fast, TextMate is better.

I use Textmate to write my documents, then Pages or LaTeX to pretty them up before printing.

 

[gockemtoad]

OpenOffice 2.3 Aqua

I downloaded the beta for OO Aqua and it seems to work a lot less sluggishly. However I can't really use this as it has all these warning about being unstable.

TextEdit is actually the nippiest editor around, so I think I'll start using that. I didn't even think about it! But I still think it's a bit poor that there is no really solid, swift word processor for my Macbook. Is it the graphics cards that makes the rendering of fonts so slow?

 

[stndn]

Well, you could download OpenOffice for Mac, although having it run through X11 actually make things worse...

If you are looking for text processing only, AbiWord might work for you. I tried it a long time ago, but the interface was somewhat messed up and it didn't do enough for what I was looking for. I'm not sure if they have fixed it, though.

It's true that NeoOffice is a little sluggish, especially on the initial loading time. But being it's free and all, I guess I could live with it.


-stndn.