stable, advanced word processor

[kensuguro]

Totally not music related, but I'm looking for a stable word processor that works well with handling longer documents with lots of charts and graphics. I've started the document on word, but after page 10 or so, the thing gets so unstable and slow that it's dangerous working on it. I found these two for OSX
http://www.redlers.com/index.html
http://www.nisus.com/pro/

But I was sort of looking for a cross platform one so I could use it on my laptop or PC desktop.. I know Openoffice works, but open office has the same problem word has, in that complex graphics seem to crash it because it tries to autoformat the graphics. I can't imagine 10 pages of charts and graphics is this hard.. I do remember I had a problem doing a 18 page document for school.. guess things haven't improved much. I really don't want to go the LaTex route since that's a pain to work with. (although it's perfect execution)

Anyone have suggestions?

[hubird]

Maybe sister Neooffice? (tho it is abandoned)

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

[hubird]

I know Openoffice works, but open office has the same problem word has,

[Shroomz~>]

You could write all of your text in Word, notepad or whatever then cut & paste it all into a pdf creator along with your images. InDesign is great, but for a free pdf creator you could try something like nova pdf or look through the office tools section on majorgeeks.

[Lima]

Latex?
(mikTex free compiler for example)
http://miktex.org/

[Lima]

oops... Just read the topic better...

[astroman]

...But I was sort of looking for a cross platform one so I could use it on my laptop or PC desktop.. ...

you may check out Papyrus Office it's cross platform and there's a demo available.
Can't really comment on stability as what we experience occasinally (we have 10 licenses at the office) seems related to individual setups (you probably know that osx spinning beach ball thingy...) and our documents are fairly short and lack graphic content.

btw noone does (and never did - for good reasons) more than say 10-20 pages per section in Word - and in InDesign the same is advisable. Been scrolling through a 30 page layout this afternoon to cut out some text... wtf

Papyrus is not an Office lookalike - a few items are not found where you'd expect them in the first place, but once you accept that - and have a peek at the manual... it seems well thought out.
At least the folks in Berlin are seriously working on it for several years now.

cheers, Tom

[kensuguro]

papyrus seems promising. I got the demo, and the fact that it doesn't open my word documents is a bit of a let down, but a word processor with LESS, is a welcomed change after how insanely unusable ms word got.

[valis]

When you build your charts & graphics are you doing that from within Word or are you doing it externally and linking/placing them in?

Also if you want to increase stability disable tracking of edits.

[kensuguro]

the charts and stuff are all from excel. So it puzzles me to see their software crash each other. Actually, excel seems to be more stable. Darn these office softwares. I'll check out the edit track thing. Frankly, I don't even know what your talking about, these things are so darn complicated!! grrrrr... Frickin' charts, text, graph, print. How did this become such a big deal..

[kylie]

I heard ragtime is a promising candidate. it is multiplatform and was free for personal use some years ago.
seems it is a commercial only app again, and it's anything but cheap, but you can testdrive it at least for 30 days. go

http://www.ragtime-online.com/

-greetings, markus-

[valis]

Unfortunately using a lot of charts/graphs that are embedded so they are editable does stack a lot of overhead into your document. I agree that you'd think after having OLE available for this long things would be more refined... Part of the overhead comes from tracking edits too. I use abiword and open office these days o I can't recall offhand where you turn that off, but if you are editing any of your excel files in place the edit tracking overhead goes up immensely, that would be the first thing I'd turn off (it's intended to make collaboration between multiple document editors easier anyway).

Beyond that the easiest workaround I can think of is to forgoe the ability to 'edit' in place and use any graphical elements in some simplified format (png etc) rather than a placed/embedded document or built in-place.

Also for what it's worth, I think Ooo (open office) has followed Firefox2 down the path of way too much bloat & overhead, which is why I started to use Abiword again for simpler tasks. And I do happen to have a current copy of Office2007 but it's relegated to my 3rd pc here as it just installs way too much background crap. I need it because some of my clients have upgraded to it and of course it defaults to its latest incompatible file format, which is poorly supported on any of the open source solutions without using extra work. But paying the MS tax to install it on my laptop & primary desktop as well...ugh.