Alternative composing/word processing software?

[elpollodiablo]

Well, Word for Mac 2011 just crashed and cost me about 45min of work. This happens I'd say at least once a week, sometimes more (usually when I'm grading and using the comment feature profusely). This version of Word is just jank as fuck; I'm running a late 2010 Core i5 MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM and it sputters, stalls, and generally gimps through everything I task it with. Was just talking to coldie yesterday about alternatives to this piece of shit software, as I've never really liked it despite have work on it for the past dozen+ years. I'd really like to make the switch to something else, but all of the standard barriers to change apply: it has to play nice with the Word formatting and be capable of being opened in multiple different programs without conversion. What are my options on a Mac? Pages?

[Chet]

open office?

http://www.openoffice.org/porting/mac/

[elpollodiablo]

Fuck that forever

[elpollodiablo]

Really, though, thanks for the suggestion but no. I probably should've mentioned that in the OP. Nothing that doesn't run natively in OS X.

[mixed cats]

I had Pages years ago when I was in school, and it was fine. It saves Office compatible files and has all of the functionality of Word. The newest version looks nicer than what I had.

[Mike24]

I was reading about a chrome app that saves every keystroke or something...

oh yeah, here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aimodnlfiikjjnmdchihablmkdeobhad#detail/aimodnlfiikjjnmdchihablmkdeobhad

I've never used it so i can't say much, but if saving your work is the concern it seems like a good bet.

[coldforge]

As I mentioned to you before, I swear allegiance firmly to the composing rather than word processing side of that divide. I don't think any long-form text composition is served by a word processor, the bulk of whose interface is dedicated to inserting things that are not text into the document (of the interface items currently showing in the default view of my copy of MS Word 2008, the text-applicable ones are new, open, save, print, undo, redo, zoom, and the outline/draft view capsules; format, tables, columns, gallery, ALL the stuff in toolbox, document elements, quick tables, charts, SmartArt Graphics, WordArt, and the ruler all have to do with either formatting or inserting non-textual elements), that doesn't fundamentally rely on lots of non-text elements—and even then I'd prefer to use Teχ.

I should note that the following paragraphs apply to long-form texts: novels and theses and the like. For printing out worksheets or whatever other one-off job today's grad student needs, I imagine they'll be overpowered. The applications I like—chief among them Scrivener and Ulysses—operate on a model where the interface is devoted to writing; they operate according to a model where the act of composition is best served by divorcing itself entirely from the act of typesetting. This model has been prevalent in computing for a long time, and I prefer it. The internet tends to run on semantic, structured plaintext that is compiled into pretty, composed documents by computers when they're done being written: Markdown, the aforementioned Teχ, and so on. Plaintext has the advantage of being very efficient and readably by pretty much any editor or computer program you can run it through.

Scrivener and Ulysses (and a bunch of also-rans I've used over the years) adopt some elaboration of this approach. The true plaintextness tends to be lost (if you were someone else I'd recommend you do what Neal Stephenson does and just write your work in vim) in favor of an environment dedicated to writing—that is, research, editing, organization, navigation—so they both break up a manuscript into multiple documents, with a variety of ways to sort, navigate among them, add notes and references, et cetera. They differ in philosophy and implementation: roughly speaking, Scrivener is more featureful while Ulysses is more militant about the division between form and content. I prefer the latter, which takes place entirely within plaintext and uses a very light, Markdown-style styling markup to indicate what formatting elements there do have to be. Scrivener takes place in rich text, which offends my purist sensibilities, but I use it for documents that do need illustrations inserted. It's got a bunch of outline views, corkboards, that sort of fun stuff.

Anyway, both of them have sophisticated tools for exporting when you're done. They'll export to any format you can think of—plaintext again, RTF, Word, HTML—and you can set parameters like how to style headings and margins and how to break up sections, smart quotes—all the formatting stuff—so it gets output looking nice. Thus are content and form kept in their separate pens.

As for standard word processors, I agree that Word is pretty painful to use. In those times when I have had need of a full-fledged word processor, like when I've finished a manuscript and I want to apply fancier, special styling, I've preferred using both Nisus Writer and Mellel to word. It's a matter of interface, and I find both of theirs to be snappier than Word's, if not particularly innovative. Another considerably full-featured word processor is Bean, which I believe is also free. In my opinion any of the above three are superior to Open Office, which had essentially no Cocoa amenities last I checked.

Keith, the really fantastic dev behind Scrivener, has a roundup of other non-word processor writing software, as well as a blurb about each one, here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.php What's interesting about these things is that they really try to address personal workflows, and thus there's a wide variety of apps of similar quality, though variable suitability.

[jess]

Even if you are using Word, you should never lose 45 min of work—that's what autosave (and also training yourself to save at frequent intervals, but i know I sometimes fail at that too) is for. Do you not have it set to run regularly? I hate Word for formatting reasons mostly, but it functions reasonably well as its intended to on my MacBook Air. I'm assuming you've checked to make sure it's up to date, and fixed permissions and all that stuff, but if not, might be a worth a look.

I had issues with formatting compatibility when I tried to switch to Pages (which seemed much better than Word in my limited use of it) a couple of years ago, and since I am sending docs back and forth and sometimes saving them in dropbox folders for multiple people (some of whom are never in a million years going to use anything but Word) to access, efficient compatibility is probably the most important feature for me. I agree entirely w/cf in theory though, and would love it if my dept stopped using word processors. Oh well.

[jm]

I'm very interested in what cf is saying above, but having a hard time understanding the distinctions being drawn (or, more accurately, having a hard time distinguishing between the preference he states and, say a barebones text editor)

[elpollodiablo]

Yeah, same here. I appreciate all of the suggestions, guys! As I was saying to cf in our correspondence, the distinction between word processing software and composition software is for the most part lost on me--which may be an effect of only having used WP software for long periods. Hard to say. What I will say is that if Word simply worked--that is, didn't crash, autosaved properly, didn't stall, etc.--I wouldn't be looking for an alternative. Although as noted I've got no basis for comparison, I'm a bit skeptical that my composing process is being dramatically affected by the plurality of formatting bells & whistles available in the tool bars. I hardly ever use them, look at them, or think of them. Sometimes I even compose in full-screen mode, which pretty much isolates the page completely, and I haven't noticed much of a difference there. Pretty much the sum total of formatting embellishments I use are italicizing, underlining, highlighting, bullet-ing, and commenting. Mostly I accomplish simple formatting tasks through keyboard shortcuts that don't even require me to reach for the touchpad. The idea of composing and adding post-hoc formatting seems very unnatural to me; like I'd have to train myself not to do it while writing before it could add anything to my actual writing process, and the training part of it would seem to make it not worthwhile. I suppose I could get behind plaintext composing to the point that the shortcuts (like *starring* for bold or something) require a modicum less effort than ctrl+whatever-ing, and perhaps lend greater continuity to the composition process, but once again I'm just not quite sure what the other benefits would be to switching at this point.

[coldforge]

Well, the formatting-free semantic quality is more specific to Ulysses. Scrivener uses rich text so it's still got all that formatting stuff. All the other parts are what make it more suited. Though, if:

Pretty much the sum total of formatting embellishments I use are italicizing, underlining, highlighting, bullet-ing, and commenting.

Why not just use something really simple, like Textedit, or Bean?

[jebreject]

I only use Google Docs ever any more.

I've used Scrivener though and loved it.

[coldforge]

Oh yeah, Google Docs is a thing.

[dieblucasdie]

Yeah, I pretty much only use Google Docs. If you're looking for "something like Word but that actually works" it pretty much fits the bill.

[elpollodiablo]

How's the commenting?

[Chet]

Google docs is cool. But you're pretty much fucked if you want to work offline.

[Thermofusion]

Can we also talk about how much Excel for Mac sucks?

[jm]

Can we also talk about how much Excel for Mac sucks?

Does it?  I've only used it to catalogue my ex-housemate's pornos, and it worked pretty well for that.  Got me some sweet pie charts out of it.

[Thermofusion]

Is there, uh, a story behind that?

Most of my problems have been with formatting, like having to spend 10-15 minutes tinkering with column spacing, picture placement, font sizes, etc. to get something I made on Excel for Mac to not look like a garbled printer malfunction after I open it in Windows. Which I guess is to be expected!

[jebreject]

How's the commenting?

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