AbiWord 0.9, Atlantis Ocean Mind 1.0 Reviews Is There Room for a Word Processor Smaller Than Microsoft Word? Eric Grevstad
Mon 10/15/01 -- Remember Q&A Write? Just Write? LetterPerfect? Textra? Back in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days, there was a thriving category of "personal word processors" or "executive word processors" -- programs that fit between bare-bones text editors like Windows Notepad and full-bore book or desktop publishers like Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect.
These programs took less cash from your wallet and less space on your hard disk than the word processing heavyweights; they couldn't generate indexes or tables of contents or edit math equations with Greek symbols, but they cheerfully acknowledged that most of us never need or use those features in our daily writing.
These days, it seems, one leviathan size fits all: Microsoft Word and its equally bloated Office-suite siblings own the productivity market, and Word's ever-changing, proprietary DOC file format is a necessity if you want to exchange documents (or macro viruses -- Ed.) with coworkers. Of course there are alternatives with impressive Office file compatibility, led by Corel's WordPerfect Suite and Sun's StarOffice, but they too are feature-rich to the point of overkill for routine reports or letters. Aren't there any right-sized word processors left for those of us who don't write memos with scholarly footnotes?
Yes, there are -- and we don't mean the freebie that comes with Windows. Microsoft's WordPad offers a good variety of font and paragraph formatting and reads and saves plain text, formatted Rich Text Format (RTF), and Word 6.0/95 DOC files (though it choked on a Word XP document we tried loading). And it offers some of the conveniences Word users are accustomed to, such as drag-and-drop editing (moving selected text with the mouse) and Ctrl-Del and Ctrl-Bksp shortcuts to delete the next or previous word.
Between Word and WordPad
But WordPad has no spelling checker, nor the document-statistics or word-count feature required by journalists or students assigned to write a 750-word essay. It lacks Word's trivial but addictive "smart quotes," which prettily change straight apostrophes and quotation marks to curly ones as you type. It can't justify text, offering only flush left, flush right, or centered paragraph alignment instead of the businesslike look of straight margins at both left and right.
And personal word processors have vanished from the retail market. Microsoft actually offers one that slots nicely between WordPad's limitations and Word's colossal complexity, but hides it under a bushel: The company bundles the bulky Word with its beginner- or family-oriented Works Suite, snubbing Works' own appealing word processing module (Works Suite owners must hunt for and create a Start-menu shortcut to WORKSWP.EXE).
Happily, a search of online shareware outlets reveals that everyday word processors are alive and well -- and inexpensive. One, AbiWord, is 100 percent free; it's an open-source word processor undergoing continual development on the Linux platform and also available for Windows (as well as Unix and BeOS). Another bears the funky name of Atlantis Ocean Mind; it's free to try for 30 days, and just $27 to register and get free upgrades to future 1.x versions.
(In the past, we've admired a third word processor, the family letter-, e-mail, and homework-targeted Yeah Write, which mixes an ultra-friendly file-folder interface -- with no need even to name document files if you don't want to -- with capable editing complete with smart quotes. But Yeah Write is limited to one font per document and hasn't been upgraded since September 2000; we think it's still worth a try and a good buy at $29, but skipped it for this review.)
