Woes!

A while back, I posted about Mellel, and the torture of Word deciding it wanted me to stop being a pirate. (Since Office is the only software other than Tiger that I paid money to install on my Mac, I find that funny in a sad, Microsoft-hating sort of way. Everything else came with the Powerbook or was free for downloading.)

Well, now that I have a nominal income, I can actually pay for some software. And I revisit Mellel, and go on a walkabout to look at other OS X friendly possibilities, only to find that it’s still pretty much Mellel, since the others have some not-so-happy-making features.

Pages (comes with iWork, sold by Apple) will save to PDF and a variety of other formats, but I dislike the way it handles documents.

AbiWord is free, runs in X11, but doesn’t seem to import/export doc files and has other limitations I dislike.

NeoOffice and OpenOffice… eh. Hate the interface.

Nisus Writer looks like Mellel, only doesn’t quite do everything and costs more money.

Mariner Write looks almost exactly like Word. Costs more than Mellel. I’d be more inclined to keep Word and pay nothing.

I suppose I could always move to something like LaTeX. At this point, though, I’m too tired to get totally geeked out and into learning something all over again. A word processor suits my time and energy better.

Which brings me back around to Mellel, which does everything including footnotes, bibliographies, outlines - not just in-text outlines, but an actual outline of the document you’re working on, for use in navigation - sections, tables, and all kinds of formatting and style-making and so forth. If I ever wanted to write for publication in the academic, non-fiction way, this would be the bee’s knees. And it would be just peachy for churning out a nice long complicated novel.

Tomorrow’s my supposed day off - I’ll be running errands and visiting my second semi-part-time-almost-job, and probably balancing my checkbook. At which point I’ll make the decision and press the paypal button.