[dividend]

Ok, three ok options for word processing on X - word, nissus and appleworks. Neither is good enought for serious writing. Hopefylly Apple will release a document-app, but what do we want from such an app?

My wish-list is a combination of framemaker and keynote:

1. WYSIWYG-view all the time
2. easy input of mathematical or logical equations
3. framemaker or indesign-style parapgraph- and character styles. In framemaker you can make headlines with more than simple text - lines and figures and all that
4. side-headlines automatically (as in framemaker)
5. advanced options for footnotes (e.g. books written into footnotes automatically go into litterature-list, and so on)
6. indesign-style text wrapping around pictures
7. word-style advanced import of characters
8. framemaker-style table-styles, but easier and more flexible
9. automatic numbering of chapters and sub-chapters (as in framemaker)
10. line-numbering (found in word, but not found in framemaker - gosh)
11. possibility to use standard frames - with this I mean that one can download a frame/theme from, say, one's department at university and have ensured that all characters, footnotes, litterature-lists &c are ecactly as required.
12. export to pdf makes automatic bookmarks and interactive content-list (you click on a content-word and it takes you there....) Found in framemaker

Framemaker is of course the best word-processor, but a tad too advanced and complicated for ensuring that one can only concentrate on the text and not on the progarmme. besides, no framemaker for X at the moment.

And a killer feature:

When exported to pdf, you can send it to a publisher who prints it into a book - making book writing easy for everybody. This i can see would be quite important, because in this IT-age of easy and very quick interaction - reason and deep thinking is not that popular anymore.

I hope that you can add other useful ideas so that I can send in this wish-list to those who write word-processing apps - then we might get the best word-processing app to OS X!

[Sharky K.]

good you start this topic. I have also a list

• style editing window like a css edit application.
• page styles / paragraphe styles / word styles
• can import omnigraffle documents
• page navigation like preview.app has but faster and hierarchic
• compare documents
• Keynote.app like interface
• rendezvous support so several people can work on the document the same time
• Fast...

MS Word does exist so long and has non of these things... (compare documents is not really working perfectly)

[dividend]

One thing would be that just like in iTunes where you can connect to the internet to get track- and albumnames, you could connect to internet and get all the details for that particular book for your litteraturelist - like, authors, title, publisher, place of publisher, year and ISBN-number. That would then go into the footnotes and to your sourse list.

[Peter]

My favourite processor is Mellel It is so fast!

[pimephalis]

Originally posted by dividend:
One thing would be that just like in iTunes where you can connect to the internet to get track- and albumnames, you could connect to internet and get all the details for that particular book for your litteraturelist - like, authors, title, publisher, place of publisher, year and ISBN-number. That would then go into the footnotes and to your sourse list.

On that line, any word processor that I would ever consider using must have seamless integration with BibTeX. In fact, it should integrate beautifully with any reference manager software, but for me BibTeX is the medium of choice and thus I would require that. Also, as someone else mentioned, it would have to have incredible equation support. Most WYSIWYG editors don't have great support for complex equations or matrices/arrays, and that is a must if you want to wean people off things like TeX.

[BHD]

Originally posted by pimephalis:
On that line, any word processor that I would ever consider using must have seamless integration with BibTeX.

That's not going to happen, and why would you want it to? BibTeX is -- like TeX itself -- only 8 bit (no unicode), and it has a really limited data model. We're living in an XML world, which opens up a new realm of possibilities for this stuff (including the earlier mention of online connection).

That said, it would certainly make sense to support import of BibTeX data, but that's rather different than "seamless integration."

[dettociao]

Originally posted by dividend:
One thing would be that just like in iTunes where you can connect to the internet to get track- and albumnames, you could connect to internet and get all the details for that particular book for your litteraturelist - like, authors, title, publisher, place of publisher, year and ISBN-number. That would then go into the footnotes and to your sourse list.

that's actually a really freaking good idea.

[BHD]

Originally posted by dividend:
One thing would be that just like in iTunes where you can connect to the internet to get track- and albumnames, you could connect to internet and get all the details for that particular book for your litteraturelist - like, authors, title, publisher, place of publisher, year and ISBN-number. That would then go into the footnotes and to your sourse list.

As much as I like this idea, is it even possible? I can't see how it could work for bibliographic references. If I type a short citation like {Smith, 1999}, how is any search engine going to know what to look for? Nevermind which author you want, but how is it going to know if it's a book, or a book chapter, or a magazine article?

It's easier for a CD in iTunes because the search criteria are more well-known and limited, and there's a single online DB AFAIK.

[cpac]

i've been looking a long time - Mellel's pretty good, but I think the interface is too inflexible/documents are too Mellel-dependent.

What I really want is TextEdit on steroids. Not many steroids mind you, just a few:
�footnotes
�headers/footers/page numbering
�Make it save as .rtf (or whatever enhanced .rtf. M$ Word uses).
I can even live without the tables, as I've gotten pretty good with the old style tab-ruler. (Many have forgotten, and many others never learned).

It'd also be nice if TextEdit grew a toolbar w/ the standard "print" "color" and "font" buttons, plus maybe an item for find/replace, page jumping (ala preview) and maybe an export to email.

Really it's not much just those two features, and the file format to support them.