Good word processing software with unicode font support?

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Level 1

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Good word processing software with unicode font support?

If this is the wrong place, apols and please redirect me.

I stopped using MS Word v.x (2001) as it doesn't support Unicode fonts, which I absolutely need. I assume the latest Word/Office for Mac supports Unicode fonts (?), but it's too expensive, and also I always found that Word crashed a lot and I don't want to support Microsoft.

I've been using the cheap Mellel for several months. I applaud its producers, but it's far too lacking in features (e.g. no alphabetical sorting) and even after months of use is very counter-intuitive.

Can anyone recommend a good all-round word processor for Leopard on a Macbook Pro which is stable, supports unicode fonts, doesn't break the bank, and has comparable features to MS Word but preferably isn't MS Word?

Macbook Pro 15", Mac OS X (10.5.6), 2.53Ghz 4GB

Posted on Jul 7, 2009 7:34 AM

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Answer 1

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hauerdie

Level 1

80 points

Jul 7, 2009 7:55 AM in response to strida

I think OpenOffice should do the it.

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,858 points

Jul 7, 2009 9:40 AM in response to strida

Can anyone recommend a good all-round word processor for Leopard on a Macbook Pro which is stable, supports unicode fonts, doesn't break the bank, and has comparable features to MS Word but preferably isn't MS Word?

Of all the word processors you are likely to come across, I think only Word X and AppleWorks, both essentially obsolete, do not support Unicode. Here is a list with summary info on each app that may be helpful:

http://www.pure-mac.com/textword.html

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Answer 3

strida Author

Level 1

5 points

Jul 7, 2009 1:22 PM in response to hauerdie

Thanks. I last tried OpenOffice with an aluminium PowerBook running Panther and I recall that it took minutes to open, so I deleted it. But I've just given it a test drive and it seems great. Many thanks.

But now I see that there is also NeoOffice – is that better for Macs?

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Answer 4

Jul 7, 2009 1:42 PM in response to strida

Hi twelveonelizzie;

One of the iMac I help to support has OpenOffice on it. I had been asked to help with another problem but after I got that fixed I was asked to look at OpenOffice. I found it to be very quick and responsive on an iMac running Leopard. Could you have been using an older version?

Allan

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Answer 5

strida Author

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Jul 7, 2009 2:06 PM in response to hauerdie

Now I've discovered that there are Open Office and Neo Office, but Go-oo too. How does one choose? Any advice?

(I discovered that, in Open Office presentations, video clips play automatically rather than when clicked, which is a big pain for me. When googling about this, I found that Go-oo supposedly has this function. I will now try it.)

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Answer 6

hauerdie

Level 1

80 points

Jul 8, 2009 5:24 AM in response to strida

Well until OpenOffice 3.0 it was not a native OSX app, because it used the X Window system. NeoOffice is a fork of OO with the aim to run native in Aqua.
With Version 3 OO runs also native on OSX but only on Intel Macs.

I have OO installed but i prefer iWork, Keynote and Pages are perfect, Numbers still lacks a lot of things. The 30 days trail is somewhere in the downloads area and Pages should also do well on unicode.

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Answer 7

strida Author

Level 1

5 points

Jul 14, 2009 10:17 AM in response to strida

OpenOffice seems to be the way to go. Now I just need to turn off the pinch zoom feature when I paste in images...

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