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Freeware word-processors

Less searchable M0rd4nt

12:32 / 31.03.04

Can anyone recommend me a good freeware WP programme?

I've been running Star Office on the big 'puter for ages now, and I'm a huge fan. But I need a word-processor for for the laptop and I don't want to load it up with a whole office suite just to get at that one function.

I was running AbiWord for a week or so, but frankly it bites. It's bugridden--attempting to access the Help file crashes the whole thing, it can't seem to load the UK English dictionary, and just recently it converted a couple of my files to six pages of question marks. Bye bye, AbiWord.

I've turned up a few similar packages on Google, but I was keen to hear some opinions rather than downloading something at random.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:44 / 31.03.04

Hoom - I was going to recommend OpenOffice, which basically *is* StarOffice, but I'm not sure if you can only download the word processor bit...

12:46 / 31.03.04

I'm not familiar with StarOffice, but I am pretty familiar with OpenOffice, and I'm assuming this will apply to both.

Just do a fresh install on your laptop, select Custom Install when prompted, and only install the word processor.

12:56 / 31.03.04

expanding out a bit - what are the freeware options for office style things for OSX?

13:20 / 31.03.04

You can get OpenOffice for OS X which uses the X11 emulator, or there's a version that's been converted to not need that using Java called NeoOfficeJ, which is easier to use and looks nicer, though is not necessarily as stable (I've not had trouble with it myself). Both seem to start verrrry slowly compared to the Windows or Linux versions.

You can also get Abiword and XAbiWord; you could, in theory, install the whole Gnome or KDE desktop and use their office suites.

There are some low-cost shareware word processors that are OS X native like Mellel. I don't know of any free ones.

trouser the trouserian

14:01 / 31.03.04

Does anyone know of a good freeware or low-cost WP (for the PC) that can handle multi-lingual spellchecking and grammar?

Tryphena Absent

14:22 / 31.03.04

I use open office and I love it!

14:23 / 31.03.04

I don't know of any word processor, regardless of cost or platform, that can properly check grammar for any language....

15:54 / 31.03.04

Not sure how good the grammar-check is, but OpenOffice is completely free. I feel a Linux-advocate urge coming on. Must... suppress...

19:33 / 31.03.04

I don't believe OO has a grammar checker at all.

nedrichards is confused

08:06 / 02.04.04

God this discussion makes an old OpenOffice.org volunteer glow, anyway.

Even if you just install the word processor part you won't save very much space or RAM as all the applications share so much underlying code.

There isn't a grammer checker because there's no free/open source grammer checker available (and I'm aware I need a spell checker more than anything else). If you know how to integrate/want to write one then please make yourself known as I know a fair few people are interested. Note: if you're a l33t programmer and want to make many dollar then download the free SDK and developers guide and write an extension which you can feel free to sell for hard cash.

NeoOffice/J is really cool, it's still a bit of a dog to start (that's not Java's fault that's a combination of OpenOffice's and OS X's) but it integrates really well into the OS with exciting features like copy and paste to the rest of the OS, simple printing and easy access to the system fonts. Youi might want to go with the X11 version if you need the latest and greatest OOo features as it's got the new 1.1.1 whilst NeoJ will be on 1.0 for another few months.

The new AbiWord for OS X is quite clever and quick although obviously it lacks a fair few of the advanced features of OOo. Good software though and worth a look. I belive its OS X backend is powering the new Nisus Writer, certainly for MS input/export.

Really if you have any more questions do ask, I happen to know more than is healthy about free/open source word processors and would be happy to share.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

02:09 / 03.04.04

My only problem with Open Office is that it takes SO long to load...I'm on a pretty fast P2 with a LOT of RAM and it takes almost a full minute to load up.

That's too slow for a decent program. If they would speed it up, I'd be much happier with it.

07:13 / 03.04.04

If you're going to use it a lot, it's worth setting it to preload most of the program when the computer boots, which, incidentally, is pretty much what MS Office does. You can start any of the components pretty damn quickly if you do that.

12:08 / 03.04.04

nedrichards: are binaries for 1.1.1 coming for OS X? I've been seeing the build instructions for it coming up recently, but I'm not going to spend several days building it.

For some reason I have a lot of trouble reading the RTF files that I generate on my Palm (with Wordsmith) in AbiWord. They come up with big black blocks on the text. This doesn't happen with TextEdit, OO, or anything else really, and it's pretty crippling given that I like to edit these docs on Palm or Mac and be able to sync them.

nedrichards is confused

13:02 / 06.04.04

Solitaire Rose: I can assure you that speed is right up there on the 'things that need improving list' 1.1 is much faster than 1.0 and I expect that trend to conmtiue, especially on non windows platforms. Lots of the origional code in OOo was done because it was really fast on Windows, sadly most of it wasn't so optimised for non windows platforms as there were less hackers out there. Now that people like Novel and Red Hat pay hackers to work on it you can expect to see those bottlenecks got rid of ikn the medium term. Apart from that preload if you can, it's a difficult balance being quick to load or quick in the UI and OOo goes for more of the later but yes, it's a problem.

Fridgemagnet: try here. I can quite sympathise with your desire not to set aside several gigabytes and days of time to build an office suite.

RTF is an interesting one becuase Apple actually use a different flavour of it than MS. It's what allows them to put all those clever drop shadows you can do in TextEdit inside. Big black blocks sounds like an encoding problem though. Do they both do UTF-8? Apart from that have a look through the AbiWord bugzilla/mailing lists. (sorry I don't have a palm.

The sooner everyone can get together and standardise on the Open Office XML format the better.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

21:21 / 06.04.04

Off-topic, but can anyone tell me if this software that's supposed to help you write novels is anything other than a huge and heartless cosmic joke? I'm thinking "newnovelist" and its ilk. Only, y'know, free.

(Why, yes, this is the voice of first-draft desperation! How clever of you to notice.)