Journal Planesdragon's Journal: Outdo Microsoft Word 2
Despite years of development and an almost universal grunt of dismay from geeks, there is no F/OSS tool that can replace Microsoft Word. It comes up short for several tasks (simple data management, spreadsheets, page layout) and is overkill for many others (simple note-taking or letter writing), but it's in a class all on its own when it comes to what it was intended for: writing.
Feel like you can prove me wrong? Know a program that can be my pen-and-paper better than I'd ever believe? Here's the chance to give it a new user and advocate. The program must:
- Be a Win32,
- Take either
- Count the words in any arbitrary section of text, including the text as a whole
- Track the changes I make at least as well as Work 2k (only the last writing session is all I really need)
- Have an on-the-fly spellchecker
- Have a built-in or hooked-in thesaurus
- Have an some option to fix common typos as a type
- have some similiar option to undo accidental typo-corrections easily
- Be able to either export to
OOo passes 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 9, but fails pretty miserably at 3, 6, and 8. I don't use OOo.
WordPerfect (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:2)
A more general way to count words in some text would be to copy it to the clipboard and punch the following into a shell prompt:
cat << EOF | wc
Paste the text into the window, hit Return, type in EOF, and hit Return again.
I don't think I've ever had any need for a thesaurus, but a little p