Thursday, September 4, 2008

Mac writing tools

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a three-part series on writing tools for the Mac: word-processors, text-editors, utilities. Helpful to anyone who's recently switched to a Mac or is thinking about it:

"Back to School: Writing tools": Parts 1, 2, 3

Of the programs covered in this series, I'm partial to Bean (word-processor, free), Pages (word-processor, part of Apple's iWork), TextExpander (keystroke saver), and WriteRoom (full-screen text-editor). I also like TextWrangler, a free text-editor. There's life beyond Microsoft Word.

comments: 2

Anonymous said...

I'm partial to Scrivener myself. I also like TextWrangler, especially with John Gruber's "Gruber Dark" BBColors color scheme. More and more, though, I find myself using LaTeX with TexShop. The only time I ever open Microsoft Word anymore is when someone sends me a .doc or .docx file.

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks for the Gruber link, Matt. I will have to try those colors in TextWrangler and (by hand) in WriteRoom.

I was amused earlier this year to discover that Pages (at least in iWork '08) opens .docx files (I don't know though how well it does with elaborately formatted .docx files).