RoughDraft Word processor

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4921

Posted by graham.smith
2006-01-06 11:27:06

Not an Outliner or remotely connected to anything I have been asking about recently, but Rough Draft is a “now” free word processor with few features, but nicely implemented. That is maybe unfair as it is actually much cleverer than it looks.

Its all of a 1.2Mb down load and fairly light on resources at about 1100k memory usage. Natively uses RTF, but will open, but not save Word and Wordperfect files.

For someone who just writes, and doesn’t need to work with graphics or figure numbers, or page layouts, cross references etc this looks a really useful tool. It has a side bar that gives access to clips, symbols, files and searche details. Open files use tabs for easy access. Well worth having a look at.

And while I am talking about Word Processors, the other nice program I have found is TextMaker 2006, well implmented low cost, fast and low resources word processor, under 4000k mem usage http://www.softmaker.com/english/product_en.htm

I have been moving a complex word document, tables graphics, headers footers TOC, and frames, between Word and Text Maker and adding comments and tracking changes in both programs and it has worked perfectly. The same document fell apart moving it into Open Office 2.01. And until now OOo had the best Word Filters I had come across.

The file takes 12 seconds to open in Word, but even allowing for the conversion process, took 4 seconds to open in TextMaker. Even more impressive is that even after the file has opened in Word, Word still chunters on building the graphics, and you cannot immediately scroll through the document. In TextMaker the file was properly opened in the 4secs and you could instantly scroll to the end of the document.

And a final comment on Word Processors, becasue it cropped up recently, Open Office is very good at opening corrupted Word and Excel files.

I don’t seem to get sent as many corrupt files as I used to, and I had forgotten about this until someone sent me a Word file that I couldn’t open, it was sent again and I still couldn’t open it. However, it opened fine in OOo, where I could save it as a Word file that Word could then open. It works well for Excel files as well and worth while keeping around for this purpose, even if you don’t use it for anything else.

Graham

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