Wow, Ester,
that was a very informative email. Thank you. I fell in love with iPhone
about a year ago, and now I am thinking about getting a laptop of some kind
made by Apple. I was curious about Pages and it was great to know that
there are users out there to share. I was wondering whether to buy Pages for
my iPhone, and your info wasn'tnecessarily for the iOS, but again it was
very informative and I appreciate people like you who are willing to spend
time explaining things in detail.
Koji
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Esther" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 3:14 PM
To: "Mac OSX & iOS Accessibility" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Text editor
Hi Catherine,
TextEdit does let you print results, and you can open Word documents that
are sent to you in this program. However, while it is easy to use, and
actually more powerful than you might initially think, it has some
shortcomings if you are looking for a word processing program to write
research papers with footnotes, for example. James Austin has done
periodic reviews of what's available in this regard. There are other good
accessible word processors -- a free program called Bean is one of them --
which also fall short in this regard, although they have several nice
features.
If you're talking about the most full-featured word-processors you
probably want to consider either Pages, which is Apple's iWork counterpart
to Microsoft Word, or Nisus Writer Pro, which is a third party program
that was recently revamped to version 2, and now is in a 2.1 release.
Both these programs can be separately purchased from the Mac App Store
(Pages for $19.99 and Nisus Writer Pro for $79.99).
There are several people on list who can give you a more detailed
evaluation of these products, and Nisus Writer Pro, in particular, has
many enthusiastic users in its new incarnation. I'll point you to an post
I wrote back in June in reply to Lynne's query about whether the new
version was worth getting:
• Re: Nisus Writer Pro; Query
http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/2011-June/013619.html
That post summarizes an extensive review of the product in TidBITS, and
excerpts key bits. The bottom line was that the writer considered it to
be an overall superior experience to using either Microsoft Word or Pages
for word processing, but he also made some very detailed comments about
topics like degree of compatibility with Word documents handed back and
forth between the two programs (mixed experience: both pluses and
minuses.)
Anne is probably the most expert user of Pages on this list. The current
version is Pages '09, and is overdue for an upgrade. My guess is that this
has been running late because it is being written to take advantage of the
changes that have been made in both Mac OS X and iOS on devices like the
iPad. This is true for the entire iWork suite (with counterparts to Excel,
Word, and Powerpoint in Numbers, Pages, and Keynote). But this is
certainly another viable alternative.
One of the shortcomings of the Mac App store is that it does not support
trial downloads -- developers can offer free lite versions of
applications, but they cannot offer a free application that later requires
you to pay an extra amount to keep it functional. So if you want to use a
trial download, you have to visit the developer's web site directly.
You can download a 15-day free trial version of Nisus Writer Pro from:
http://www.nisus.com/pro/
Apple used to have a trial download page for the iWork suite at:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/
I don't know whether that still works. Now all the apps are separately
purchasable at the Mac App Store.
There was also a discussion about Nisus Writer Pro vs. Pages on this list
in July. You can read through the thread at the secondary Mail Archive
pages for this list:
• Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 Versus Pages; [Revisited]
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00117.html
To read down the thread, use the access key shortcut Control+n to navigate
to the next post in the thread and Control+p to go to the previous post in
the thread. These access key shortcuts work for all browsers on different
platforms if you substitute the appropriate access key (e.g., for Internet
Explorer use Alt+n and Alt+p; for Firefox I think it is Alt+Shift+n and
Alt+Shift+p). Since we have a new Mac VoiceOver user who is sighted, I
should mention that if you started Safari without VoiceOver running, then
the access key combination is Control+Option+n for next and
Control+Option+p for previous. But if you started Safari with VoiceOver
running it is just Control+n and Control+p.
There is one other interesting new app for writing called Scrivener.
Rather than being focused on the generation of output, it's set up for the
use of people who write a lot, and want to easily access intermediate
tools like outlines and lists of ideas. Scrivener is also available from
the Mac App Store ($44.99) and is accessible with VoiceOver. They also
have a 30-free trial download of their product, but they are also running
a NaNoWriMo trial special. This abbreviation stands for "National Novel
Writing Month", which runs for the month of November. So they started a
special trial download that would run through till December 7, regardless
of when it was downloaded, and announced this at the end of October. At
this point, you would be better off getting the regular trial download of
Scrivener for the 30-day expiration, but there's another offer that is
described on the web page of the Scrivener NaNoWriMo trial page at:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo.php
If you purchase Scrivener directly from the developer's web page, you can
enter a coupon code of "NANOWRIMO" (without the quotation marks) to
receive a 20% discount on the $44.99 price. Also, if you actually become
a winner in the National Novel Writing Month competition, you are eligible
for a 50% discount on Scrivener.
You can also read a review of Scrivener by a VoiceOver user at Austin
Seraphin's blog:
http://behindthecurtain.us/2011/09/07/scrivener/
As a final comment, for people who write technical papers with math and
equations, there is a word processing solution with LaTeX that is
completely accessible through an application called TeXShop, which is
freeware. It's very powerful, and has excellent multilingual support, but
a steep learning curve, so it won't be a solution for most people unless
they use it a lot. (When I tell you that TeX was originally designed to
get around the high price of mathematics books due to the costs associated
with typesetting equations you may understand -- TeX can be used to
produce publication quality books, and is used by some publishers, as well
as being a standard for advanced papers in some scientific and technical
fields.) While some people, like James Austin, find it worthwhile to
learn for writing large numbers of (non-mathematical) papers at
university, that's not the norm.
HTH. Catherine, apologies for the late reply, but I lost the email that
you sent me directly yesterday when I was trying to respond, so thanks for
writing back on list.
Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 9, 2011, at 06:08, Catherine Golding wrote:
Is Text Editor a complete word processing program from which I can print?
Do I need to buy IWorks or another document program?
Catherine Golding
Olympia, Washington
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