78 replies to this topic

[Joshua French]

For those of you who like the look of LaTeX but don't want to deal with the learning curve, you may consider LyX. It's essentially a frontend to LaTeX. It's a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you meant) processor. It's not what you see is what you get, but it gives you a great idea of what it will look like and it is much easier to use than LaTeX.

[RichS]

Howdy. I have quite an assortment of word processors.

Mellel - for handling Hebrew is the best and for academic writing. I like the power of the multiple independent note streams, auto-titling, and style sheets. Mellel 2.7 has been announced and will include text around objects. Never crashes.

Nisus Writer Pro - "feels like a word processor should. Solid as a rock. i use this for quick and easy writing.

OpenOffice 3.1 - one of two replacements for MS Office on my computer. Solid, but a little quirky at times. Mac version does not handle Hebrew (even from an alignment perspective, extending beyond borders); Windows and Linux versions handle Hebrew properly.

NeoOffice 3.0.1 - Solid, more Mac-like than OO.org 3.1 and it handles Hebrew better. I use both for exchanging files with MS Office users.

Papyrus 12.5 - both Windows and Mac versions available. Cross between word processor and page layout. I published a book 3 years ago using it, not one problem, solid as a rock, handled many graphics and rearrangements, auto numbering superb, etc. I even provided the final PDFs for the printer using the program. Handles Hebrew ... sort of ... meaning you can type Hebrew in individual words, but you have to place the words in reverse order. So I do not use Papyrus for that.

InDesign (whole Premier CS4 Suite) - just picked it up earlier this year because of my job.

RagTime 6.0 - bought it several years ago and found it capable page layout and word processor. Solid, but different.

[R. Mansfield]

Macworld just released a review of Nisus Writer Pro 1.4 giving it very high marks. Does anyone use this?

[markusvonkaenel]

I use NeoOffice. It handles hebrew much better than Openoffice. And NeoOffice is better integrated in Mac than OpenOffice. On the other hand there is Mellel, but not free of charge.

Edited by markusvonkaenel, 17 December 2009 - 02:54 PM.

[William B]

I use pages for word processing, I have never had any problems or issues with it .

[Mark Allison]

I get a lot of Windows Office documents from students. I got so tired of font incompatibilities between the Mac and Windows versions of Office that I'm using Office 2007 with VMWare Fusion. I have it running in Unity mode, so Word, PowerPoint, etc., open just like Mac apps. It even automatically converts all the Windows shortcuts to the Mac equivalent. You can hide Word, minimize it to the dock and quit with command-q, just like a regular Mac app. Of course, copying and pasting to and from these Windows apps is totally seamless.

I hate the idea of running Windows apps on my Mac, but I hate the frustration of having to deal with the differences between the Mac and Windows versions of Office even more.

Mark

[R. Mansfield]

Mark, there shouldn't be font incompatibilities if students use standard fonts. What kind of crazy fonts are your students using ? :-)

In my syllabi, I simply have a statement that all papers must use either Times or Times New Roman at a 12 point size.

Now, having said that, I do have Word 2007 loaded into Parallels, but the only time this becomes an issue with my students is when I need to show them how to do basic things (which they ought to already know) such as setting margins, turning off extra spacing between paragraphs and the like.

[Outis]

I'm beginning to think that there are issues with specific Unicode Hebrew fonts like SIL Ezra and SBL Hebrew, because the default OS X Hebrew fonts (Lucida? New Peninim MT) seem to render more accurately than these third-party fonts. More likely OS X doesn't know what to do with the information embedded in the font about how to render it.

That said, NeoOffice (as of the 2.0 alpha) does not have complete Hebrew support (it's not listed by default under the Language dropdown in Character formatting): there are some issues with vowels and cantillation in most fonts, though it appears that the OpenOffice project on which it is based has Hebrew and Arabic localizations. And right-to-left entry of consonants seems to work.

Two comments:

1) The only font I've been able to successfully export into other formats (html, rtf, etc) is Lucida Grande. The greek is fine. The hebrew font is pretty ugly. But, at least it stacks up the vowels where they are supposed to go.

2) As far as Mellel goes, yep, I agree, they are the only ones who can get the hebrew to look right. But, the difficulty is that when you would like to export that document to some other format it seemingly always puts it into a format which other programs don't recognize. For example, if you export to .rtf, when you open that up in open office or something else, it looks ugly (or to be specific, the hebrew looks ugly). For me, this defeats the point of using Mellel. If I want pretty documents with Hebrew, I can just use XeTeX. I bought Mellel so that I could export it to some format that can play well with others. If I want to share a document with my PC-using friends, there doesn't seem to be a good app out there for sharing documents which contain other languages.

[R. Mansfield]

Has anyone tried out Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

http://symphony.lotu...y/home.nsf/home

[Joe Weaks]

Has anyone tried out Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

http://symphony.lotu...y/home.nsf/home

I only know that it is a repackaged edition of OpenOffice.

[R. Mansfield]

Well, I will say that I very much like the interface. And it took unicode Hebrew better than Word does:

 Screen shot 2010-01-28 at 11.12.17 PM.png   200.21K   106 downloads

[Rick Bennett]

Well, I will say that I very much like the interface. And it took unicode Hebrew better than Word does:

 Screen shot 2010-01-28 at 11.12.17 PM.png   200.21K   106 downloads

Does the auto-footnote insertion from Acc work? I assume so since it does in OOo.

[R. Mansfield]

Yes, it works!

 Screen shot 2010-01-28 at 11.47.02 PM.png   206.44K   94 downloads

[R. Mansfield]

Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac was announced today. Here is a screenshot of Word:

 64902532-a407b17a458b1c8be52083655788ed78.4b74671a-full.png   814.66K   120 downloads

A while back, it was promised that this version of Word would get right to left text so that Hebrew could be formatted correctly. I've got an email in to Rick Schaut, a lead programmer for Word, to confirm that this ability made the cut.

[Timothy Jenney]

Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac was announced today. Here is a screenshot of Word:

 64902532-a407b17a458b1c8be52083655788ed78.4b74671a-full.png   814.66K   120 downloads

A while back, it was promised that this version of Word would get right to left text so that Hebrew could be formatted correctly. I've got an email in to Rick Schaut, a lead programmer for Word, to confirm that this ability made the cut.

I like what I see here—and its promised improved abilities in Hebrew. Now, if MS would only restore the ability to open older documents, I'd be very, very happy. [I have Pages, but used MS Word for too many years to consider switching now.]

[R. Mansfield]

FYI: still no RTL support in the next version of Mac:Word: http://www.officefor...92.TqqAazLOdmP@

[Jonna Schmidt]

I am dedicating this machine to Accordance and to Bible study. So I need to hear from veteran users what they consider the finest word processor, especially for Greek and Hebrew texts. It also needs to be somewhat Microsoft (can I use that word on this forum?) compatible (i.e. files which can be read by MSWord - my laptop is PC). I have heard of Word for Mac, Mellel, and Note Bene. What suggestions can you give me.

I know that Mellel is probably a better word processor for Hebrew et al....but, just to put forth another name besides Word, Mellel and Nisus, I would recommend Mariner Write. I have to say that I like it very much. It is very intuitive and seems to handle any imported text from Accordance very well. They have a demo at http://www.marinerso...age.php?page=12. It is a very fast, small footprint, economical word processor with good support. Give it a try.

pr dave speers
dspeers@altamont.net

[Jonna Schmidt]

Hi

I am not an original language user. I can barely distinguish an Aleph from an Alpha. HOWEVER, even I would recommend Mellel, hands down. Some considerations

1. Inexpensive
2. Even I can tell that it does a better job with Hebrew. My pastor's son is going to seminary, and I was helping to get a G5 iMAC ready for him just a few months ago.
Admittedly, all the programs will render a phrase such as DAY of the LORD as yøâwM y◊hwD¡h if you are just interested in doing a simple copy-paste.

3. HOWEVER, if you are interested in actually typing something in Hebrew -- Mellel is what you need. You see, if you type in the phrase Day of the Lord, and
change to Hebrew in WORD: you will get LEFT to RIGHT rendering, not RIGHT to LEFT. For example, even a non-Hebrew trained person like myself can at
least change Mellel to hebrew, and then type in "YOM YHWH" -- and it will appear properly in Hebrew.

4. Mellel does a FANTASTIC job if you are used to the OLD MICROSOFT WORKS program, i.e you like to type in "outline form".

5. Finally, Mellel does a great job with footnotes, etc. I am not sure about the other programs, but Mellel can allow you to choose between different footnote styles
such as Terabian, etc.

All the way around, I would suggest Mellel.

Jonna from Michigan

[Ron Webber]

Absolutely ... Mellel ... hands down the best choice.

Ron