Thursday; computer troubles...

[ozarque]

One of the things that happened when we moved was the discovery that there was no way my antique Macintosh could be made to work in our new apartment. Which means that I now have an iMac with many bells and whistles. That's good -- except when it gets in the way of getting my work done

Comments

[fjm]

I can't manage specifics but autopope is the chap to ask.

[autopope]

I'd say there are three options:

1. OpenOffice/NeoOffice/LibreOffice -- three forks of the OpenOffice open source office suite. Probably not suitable because it's too damn similar to Microsoft Office circa 2003. Pluses: it's free.

2. Apple's Pages program. It's cheap (available from the Mac App Store for about $15) and looks like a solid, fairly full-featured word processor that is firmly Mac-centric and has some page layout capabilities. Can read and write Word documents, but not MacWrite Pro -- for that, you'll need a copy of something like MacLink Plus (a file conversion tool). NB: Pages is the replacement for the word processor in AppleWorks, itself descended from ClarisWorks, which absorbed MacWrite a very long time ago (in computing years).

3. This is not a word processor, but a novel writing toolkit: Scrivener. I'm using it, and so are a bunch of other novelists; it's rather hard to describe what it does, but it combines corkboard/index card views with an outline processor and a word processor and a system for organizing

even more alternatives

[tkil]

This is perhaps getting to extreme, but perhaps ozarque could switch to a text processing system such as LaTeX or DocBook/XML? That would allow her to generate just the text, then let something / someone else worry about formatting.

(This might also be easier for the publisher to handle, depending on what input format they like.)

Although, the last time I looked at publication submission standards for journals and the like, it looks like all but the most technical journals had switched to MS Word submissions...

[skipperdee]

LaTeX's learning curve is extreme enough that I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who *isn't* using it for serious formatting. It's fairly popular in formal linguistics, because it allows the user to seriously control layout of things like syntax trees, and I strongly recommend it for that -- but if you're just looking for a word processing tool that can be picked up and used, it's pretty opaque. Many academic publishers accept it, but I can't imagine that most fiction publishers would regard it with anything other than abject terror.

To me, OpenOffice is a pretty good suggestion -- as autopope notes, it's pretty similar to Office 2003, which is quite similar to most earlier model word processors in interface. I don't have experience with MacWrite, so I can't comment directly upon it, but I started my computing career in Windows Write, and found the transition to Word to be pretty fluid. (I was also 15 at the time, so your mileage may vary.)

[johnpalmer]

Well... can you hire (or, maybe, just ask) someone to tutor you? And, can you do your tasks in MacWrite, so you can show someone what you need to do, and have that person walk you through the same tasks in Word a few times?

Or, maybe they can make macros or templates
(or, if you'd prefer "Maybe they can do some magic")
... so that you can have buttons to press to bring up windows to do the things you need?

For me, I think I'd need to either drill the new way to do it, over and over (wasting time now, but saving frustration in the long run), or have it done as macros and templates ("magic") so I could just click the button, type in the box, and click "save" (or close). But we all learn new things differently - I don't know if that would work for you.

[autopope]

MacWrite doesn't run under OSX. At all. It's about fifteen years old.

And Microsoft Word 2011 is really horrible for a Mac user -- it just doesn't work quite like anything else!

Finally? Cost per hour of hiring a tutor exceeds the cost of a new piece of word processing software after a very short period of time.

[johnpalmer]

Well, then, those suggestions are quite worthless for you, aren't they? But I didn't offer them to you.

[autopope]

The initial question was what to use instead of Word, by someone with a background using a specific Mac app. Offering to fix Word by adding macros and templates doesn't really address the problem, which is Word being utterly alien to the user interface paradigm preferred by the user.

(Also: as I understand it, the goal is to write novel manuscripts. Which are not noted for their internal structural complexity and use of bells and whistles such as indexes and footnotes. In fact, if you supply a publisher with an MS that contains suchlike ephemera they tend to get quite irate.)

[writerwench]

I've found successive versions of Word increasingly irritating and tricksy to use. I stick with Word 2003, which does the few, simple, basic things I want it to do, without fuss or being too clever.

[tapati]

Tricksy is a great word for it. I also stick with Word 2003. :)

You can do this!

[shalanna]

I could come over there and help you . . . but everyone's snowed in and I have SO much that I gotta do every day just to keep Casa el Dumpo and its denizens running

Re: You can do this!

[hagsrus]

Even easier: for existing text, highlight then control-i to turn on italics, control-i again to end italic.

OR: for new text control-I, type what you want, then control-I again to toggle off.

Control-b for bold, control-u to underline.

This assuming they haven't changed it since Word 2003!

Re: You can do this!

[archangelbeth]

Command-i on a Mac, not Control-i.

Re: You can do this!

[hagsrus]

Yes, sorry - I'm not a Mac user but assume those are pretty much universal.

try it with non-important things first?

[tkil]

It might be worth "losing" a day just playing around with the software. That's how I learned most of the packages I used. (And working with "junk documents" means that I never had to worry about losing real work, etc