User:Maury Markowitz/Manifesto for a Better Word Processor/What programs do we need to study?

Let's try to collect a good list of programs we should be looking at, and a little about what makes them interesting.

Mellel - this might just be the starting point for the perfect word processor! Great support for almost all the features anyone actually uses, excellent multilingual support, and powerful long-document editing options.

FullWrite Professional - this might be difficult to examine given that it barely ran on modern Macs ten years ago. Still, it's free, and might work just fine under "Classic" on MaxOS X. Things to check out: sidebars, outliner...

MacWrite Pro - I never managed to use this program, although I was interested in doing so. I hear it is slow and not very powerful, yet has a reasonably well done style system. We should also consider what to do to recreate the XTND system, a wonderful idea that was allowed to wither for no good reason. Another thing to try out is the zoom functionality, which everyone loved.

Microsoft Word - their implementation of spelling/grammar "on the fly" was a wonderful advance. I also like their auto-ligatures and things like turning "3rd" into superscripts. Generally the auto-typing sections, which are new, seem well implemented and allow someone to just type and get a nice looking document -- sadly the rest of the program, the older parts, makes that maddeningly difficult.

Nisus Writer - excellent history/guide at. Nisus seems designed for a small screen only, which is something we should reverse. It might be interesting to consider having Nisus-like "bars" sliding on and off the screen at the top. Layout Page is not needed, a full page should fit on most people's monitors today, and if not, that's what MacWrite's zoom was for. That find dialog looks interesting!

MindWrite - seems to be the first WP with an outliner. Other features included multiple clipboards (better handled through a universal clipboard/scrapbook viewer IMHO) and list numbering/sorting.

PREP - a multi-user document writing system, which allows different users to make comments in an series of "sidebars". Sounds very interesting, perhaps something could be implemented using these comments, versioning and sidebars?

iStorm - another collabrative editor, OSX/Cocoa?

Z-Write - a WP/outliner geared toward writing novels/screenplays/etc.