First I looked in the Help menu, then my Pages manual. Why didn't I learn it the first time? Because it sucks. Today I needed to do page numbering in Pages (3.0.3), which I don't often do, and I had to re-learn it. All three variants require Java for some functions. NOTE: Report building is omitted in the current release of NeoOffice because of security vulnerability issues. Choosing between the three in my experience NeoOffice has the best integration with OS X functionalities and is perhaps a bit faster, LibreOffice has the most pleasing GUI, and OpenOffice itself "feels" the clunkiest. To be honest, I have not used any of the OpenOffice variants to create a large document, so I don't know how well they would handle that. The OpenOffice variants offer the distinct advantage of built in graphics, spreadsheets, charting, databases, report building, and creating mathematical formulas, which would appear to be a significant advantage for your work. Harking back to your initial post, I think you would be better served by Pages than Nisus. It is great for letter writing and short or modest documents but IMO it is not up to large, complex documents or graphic intense documents. I no longer use Nisus for my work because its layout capability and features were not up to the task. Nisus is clean, fast, has a reasonable learning curve, and easy to use. I used Nisus for a few years and I liked it. Apparently, this feature doesn't work, and there doesn't appear to be any timeline for it to be fixed. However, my statement appears to be premature. In my first post on this topic I mentioned that the advantage of these was that it is possible to hot link from a word processor document to a chart on a spreadsheet. I have been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but primarily for the spreadsheet. That's too bad, because LaTeXiT (which is free) does beautiful equation formatting, but none of these word processors appear to support it. One unfortunate thing is that equation editing has to handled by an external application, which is more expensive than the word processor (twice as much!). The determining factor will be how well they handle imported graphics. It's nice to see that these all have free trial versions, so I can check them out. I'm also looking at Mellel, which appears to be aimed at the kind of things I do. I've now had a closer look and it looks very promising. I did run across some reviews of Scrivener in my searches, but didn't have a chance to check it out. So, I'm looking for word processor suggestions, from people who create documents similar to mine, lots of charts and equations. And the equations produced by its equation editor are very ugly compared to what can be done with LaTeX formatting. There's something not quite right about their font metrics. On top of that, I don't much care for the way LibreOffice documents look. But I find it very cumbersome to use, to the point that I don't see much advantage over the copy/paste hell that I have to endure in Pages. It has a built-in equation editor, and more sensible linking of its charts to LibreOffice spreadsheets. Most of them have been edited several times. The last document that I created has 49 charts, and over 120 equations. Pages doesn't have one, so I have to go into LaTeXiT, create the equation, copy/paste. If I need to make a change in the chart then I have to go back and redo the chart, copy/paste, etc. It's too limited in its charting capabilities (their "my way or the highway" attitude to formatting, and no log scale option on the x-axis, ya gotta be kidding!), which means that I have to create charts in some other program and then copy/paste them into Pages. Unfortunately, I've reached a point where I'm finding it to be too cumbersome for what I want to do. I like it because it's very easy to use, and the resulting documents look very good. As you may have noted from some of my recent posts, I use iWork's Pages word processor quite a bit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |