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 note
Microsoft Office
Original Macintosh System Fonts
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (35.8MB)
5by5
Buy MPU Gear
Facebook
KatieFloyd.me
Mac Roundtable
MacSparky
Twitter: David
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
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
)
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
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/
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/
As Jose mentioned, TextMate is excellent if you write in LaTeX. I’ve been looking at Scrivener and I think it’s not a good choice if you’re writing in LaTeX even though there is some support through MultiMarkdown.
For just equations, if LaTeX is installed, I recommend LaTeXit (http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/programmation/latexit_en.php). One uses LaTeX syntax to write the equations and you can export as PDF or an image. Plus, it supports LinkBack. LinkBack is supported in various Omni apps and it means that if you have an equation in an OmniGraffle document that was created in LaTeXit, you can double-click it and LaTeXit will open and edits will automatically update in the Graffle document. For people who don’t know LaTeX syntax, TeX FoG (http://homepage.mac.com/marco_coisson/TeXFoG/) allows you to click buttons to create the equation which you can then paste into LaTeXit.
I love OmniGraphSketcher and use it regularly to draw graphs for my solution sets. One really nice thing is that you can edit the axis labels so you don’t need to use just plain numbers. I just wish you could use LaTeX syntax in the labels.
Hi,
I found your podcast more than a year later than I should have.
It’s so nice that I became addicted to it. Not a problem though cause being late to find you means I have 30 podcasts to listen for next month!
I write the comment under this post because I just finished listening to this episode and fortunately the information you gave is still pretty much valid and very helpful.
I think the only thing was missing is the lack of support for right to left languages like farsi, arabic or hebrew in those flagship word processors. So far I found only Mellel very capable of handling that. But I guess majority of your listeners don’t need such a feature any ways.
Again thanks for fantastic your fantastic podcast which is a real pleasure to listen.
Keep it up.