[LMB] AKICOTL: OT: Word help, pretty please???

[Elizabeth McCoy]

At 9:06 AM -0700 7/11/07, Azalais Aranxta wrote:
>On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Elizabeth McCoy wrote:
>
>> Word can be very useful, but the way they load the defaults? It
>> only becomes useful once it has been beaten down and told to
>> call me "Mistress."
>
>Word is very frustrating.  Very.  Unfortunately, it's also the
>only program that I know of that does some of the things I need
>it to do.  I tried switching to Open Office, but I found that you
>can't make Open Office globally replace 'codes' (things like hard
>returns, line breaks, standardised forms of dashes and
>ellipses).

Really? Huh. I haven't played with Open Office much. 

I _have_ used AbiWord, which functions much like an older version of Word, 
and which I would probably entirely switch to if only it supported fonts 
better on my Mac. (It doesn't display them well. *sigh*)

I've also used TextEdit, which has proven that it can handle nearly 200K in 
words with a hiccup. If I wanted to let it do things in RTF mode, it's 
probably be even more useful, but I don't like its RTF mode (visual quirk 
on my part; I'm not dissing it), so I work only in .txt with it. It
doesn't have word-count, but my spouse hacked up a little applet thingy
so that I can word-count when I want and it pops up the answer in a
textedit box.

>I hate Micro$oft and I'd like to use open source software--but
>not if it takes me three times as long and I can't make the
>results work for me visually.

Have you tried AbiWord? It's been compiled for several different
platforms.
-- 
--Beth, arcangel at io.com     http://www.io.com/~arcangel/