MPU 005: Word Processing and Writing

Episode five takes on word processing and writing on your Mac. It is no longer all about Microsoft Word. Apple’s own Pages is becoming a contender and there are several other tools that will help you write better.

Links of Interest:

Microsoft Office

OpenOffice

NeoOffice

Apple Pages

Scrivener

WriteRoom

MacSpeech Dictate

TextExpander

OmniGraphSketcher

The Scourge of Arial

Original Macintosh System Fonts

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5 Responses to “MPU 005: Word Processing and Writing”

  1. Mark Thirlwall Says:

    Just listened to the show and again a nice and informative podcast. Just an additional note with reference formula in Pages or any iWork document. I use Grapher (from the utilities pane) to insert formulas. Just create the formula and copy as PDF and paste into you document. It works for the limited information i have to use, but works well

    Keep up the good work

    Mark

  2. Gabor Says:

    Hi Katie and Dave!

    Very well done (and certainly not too long), congratulations!

    The very good thing is that it’s a podcast, not a screencast, I can therefore listen to it everywhere I want while doing manual work.

    Only a SLIGHT drawback: I wish you had devoted a little less time to Microsoft Word to leave some room for the inescapable Mellel…

    Please, keep going, I’m looking forward to the next show :-) )

  3. Jose Lobato Says:

    Hi Dave and Katie,

    Thank you for the podcast, very good information.

    I would like to mention that many, many technical people use Latex for work processing (or publishing… not sure of the right term). I use it on the mac with TextMate and Aquaemacs and it works fantastic.

    There are many reasons. One of them is that I do not want to have binary files for my documents, they do not match very well with version control systems.

    Regards

  4. Michael Fessler Says:

    Hi — enjoyed the podcast very much. One criterion I have for selecting a wordprocessor is multilingual capability. I create and edit bilingual documents in Hebrew, so I need right-to-left script support.

    Believe it or not, Pages doesn’t do this right, and neither does Word 2008!

    Neo Office and OpenOffice do; so does TextEdit; but for these kinds of documents, I just picked up a copy of Mellel, which has been around for a long time. One very nice feature: if you are writing a bilingual document, it lets you pick a font for each language — when you switch scripts, it automatically switches fonts as well. Only Mac WP I’ve found that does that.

    More info on Mellel is at:

    http://www.redlers.com/

  5. Bernd Says:

    Hallo Katie and Dave!
    Just missing some words about VoodoPad.
    Like it very much and use the functions:
    “Export to iPhone” and “Web export” – very offen.
    see http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/

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