Text and Editing
October 2, 2006 – 12:49 pmI haven’t liked any of the word processors that I have used since Word 5.1. Since then Word has grown into a half-text-editor-half-page-layout-all-crap monstrosity, and every alternative tries to be like Word.
This is what I want:
•Formatting (bold, italic, font type, font size, alignment (left, right, center, justified) line spacing (1, 1.5, 2) margin control) that doesn’t use OS X’s extremely crappy font widget, you know the one that is a mile wide and doesn’t fit anywhere… and keeps getting opened when I think I’m trying to open a new tab in my browser but iChat is actually the front application.
•In-line spell checking(the only good idea that was added to Word after 5.1) based on the system wide built in dictionary and custom dictionary (I’m looking at you Neo Office)
•Grey (I’m still looking at you Neo Office) formatting characters (you know like a little grey dot for a space, and arrow for a tab, a paragraph mark for a return)
•Automatically numbered footnotes would be nice, but I don’t know how much more writing I will be doing that includes footnotes.
•Save as (rtf, watever other good formats there are)
Clippy* (you know that great little Office assistant… I love clippy)
Seriously… those are the options I want on my word processor. I DON’T USE ANYTHING ELSE!
*I don’t like clippy, I was just kidding. He is only slightly less annoying that anything that begins with “Auto” and is in a Microsoft product.
