Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Free Mac Writing Software

General Writing Discussion
#1

Hello everyone. So I’ve been working on writing some stories for some anthologies and I’m starting to run into problems as people don’t have a specific standard. Some people want .doc or .docx, some people want .rtf, or even .txt and with info on Mac software is very vague, I’ve had trouble finding good software to use like I would on a Linux or Windows machine.

My current software can’t do all of these formats so my question is this: What should I use?

I currently use FocusWriter but it’s not perfect by any means and it’s not very good for editing software. My bank account is giving me trouble so I have to wait until someone fixes it so I can’t buy any software. So I need software that is: free, on OSX, easy to download and has necessary editing features like changing fonts, line spacing and the likes. Does anyone know of any of the top of their heads (or just in general)? Thanks in advance; I appreciate the help.

#2

Hi Ash

OpenOffice should do the job. It’s not perfect, but it includes a fully-featured word processor and will let you do everything you’ve mentioned in your post.

#3

Alright, I’ll give it a look-see.

I want to see what others say though before I make a total commitment.

#4

OpenOffice and LibreOffice split over some very inside-baseball spat a few years back. If OpenOffice doesn’t work for you (it never felt right for me, though I used it for years) you might find LibreOffice works better. It’s mostly a Coke/Pepsi thing where the product is fundamentally the same but a few tweaks either direction mean people strongly prefer one or the other.

Short answer: JM has a good suggestion. If that doesn’t gel, try LibreOffice instead.

#5

I find LibreOffice works better for me than OpenOffice, but neither is my top pick.

The current version of Pages, free with your Mac, can open and save in .docx. However, bizarrely, it won’t open/save RTF.

Luckily I still have the old version of Pages ('06?) from my previous Mac, so I run both as necessary. It’s not ideal, but OO and LO take such an age to do anything I avoid them if at all possible.

These days I do most of my work in Scrivener (I bought it half price in a NaNoWriMo offer), which I love to bits and exports to anything you like.

#6

OpenOffice doesn’t seem to be my thing but LibreOffice seems to work for what I need at the moment.

Pages itself didn’t come with my system and while Scrivener seems interesting, it’s not my thing.

What frustrates me is that there seems to be a lack of free, open-source software like there is on Linux and Windows. Not even that but there doesn’t even seem to be good freeware software on Mac, which is a crying shame. While it is disappointing, I’m at least happy that I found something that works.

#7

This is what I found. I spent some time experimenting with free-ware for word processing last year, hoping to get away from Microsoft Word. My final conclusion was that Word seems to be the professional standard, and – regardless of how I feel about it – it was what I needed to use. I hope you have better luck.

#8

I would get Microsoft Word if money wasn’t an issue (more so giving it then getting it). Otherwise I would’ve bought Word or Scrivener instead of using LibreOffice.