Best Word Processor on OS X

[muyongshi]

I mostly use Neo Office as Word stinks when it comes to typing in Chinese and as far as I can tell it has the best support for asian languages but I haven't tried a ton. I can get very frustrated when trying to do Chinese word processing, especially if I use 表音 to do pinyin input beside characters as it always seems that one or the other doesn't work properly.

Word leaves huge spaces between the cursor and the characters and so editing is a pain and overall it just doesn't seem to work very well...

What have others found to be the best overall word processor when dealing with characters and english?

[DrWatson]

I like Mellel myself. It was designed with support for right to left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, from the beginning and it has always had great international support. It also supports vertical input. I don't do that much word processing at home, and I'm not very "digital" with my Chinese studies so I can't really comment too much. I believe there is a demo for the software so perhaps download it and give it a go?

[badr]

I use Mellel for my multilingual documents but have gotten increasingly comfortable with apple's own Pages. It handles chinese beautifully.

Haven't really used M$ in a while because of the same problems you mentioned... it was a pain.

[lilongyue]

Open office? Haven't used it myself, just use MS word for Mac, but I think they have a Mac version.

[LaoZhang]

uggh, NeoOffice, so slow on my G4 and the formatting always gets messed up with going back and forth between windows machines.

I prefer bare bones and Text Edit works fine for basic needs.

[muyongshi]

Haven't used it myself, just use MS word for Mac, but I think they have a Mac version.

You notice the part where I mention that it sucks with handling the characters on my Mac....

[imron]

OpenOffice and NeoOffice aren't exactly the same thing, NeoOffice is a fork of OpenOffice ported to use native OSX libraries. You can run OpenOffice separately if you also setup an X server, but that's a pain and then you have to put up with a *nix interface instead of an OSX Aqua one. There is also a pre-release version of a native Aqua OpenOffice for OSX.

Also, I don't know if you've noticed it, but on the NeoOffice page, there is now a big yellow banner saying:

NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 6 improves Microsoft Office 2007 file handling and removes recent Asian text input and layout changes

Anyway, have you tried using iWorks? I've heard quite a few good things about it.

[Robert14]

I've always used Apple's Pages, typically available as part of iWork. It handles Chinese and English flawlessly. Plain old Text Edit also works, but without the Pages' elegant formatting and viewing options.

[muyongshi]

Well, as I've done research into everyones great suggestions I don't think I will go the mac produced route as of price and the fact that my comp only has the '06 version of iworks so that means I would HAVE to buy '08 and get it shipped.

I like mellel so far but the biggest problem is that I cannot adjust column width and I wind up using columns a lot. I never would have thought something that simple wouldn't be a feature! Anyway I do use plain text a lot but I also need something for formatting as I do use a lot of formatted stuff! Thanks for all the suggestions!

[badr]

ahem.. bittorrent.. ahem

download the trial version of iwork then activate it from serial surfer.

how about abiword ? anyone try it yet?

[muyongshi]

Well quick update, I think I like pages the best and have been using that recently...