I continue to get mixed reports on some issues regarding Word Processors. For instance, Chris Heard tells me Right to Left Unicode Hebrew is working for him in iWork just as well as it does in TextEdit.
But I read other reports, such as a note from tom140 on a TidBits forum (Comment #13) reporting:
Another shortcoming is that iWork is full of bugs when working with
RTL scripts like Hebrew/Arabic which were fixed in TextEdit years
ago. But since Office can't do these scripts at all, this isn't
such a problem.
I think I will soon put together a table of features for those of us interesting in writing on biblical studies and then have folks who use each package extensively to rate how the software holds up. I had planned on doing this after January when Word '08 comes out. I may not wait.
Update:
It'd be nice if Redlex updated their WP comparison table. But what I'm interested is information on comparing broad features, any one or two that could be deal breakers for a particular scholar's work. For instance, in how I work, scriptability is a must. Here's my list so far of features that are potential deal breakers for biblical scholars, ranked ever so generally in the order of how potentially important the feature may be to biblical scholars. Let me know your additions and suggestions for the list.
- Intel version
- Bibliographic software integration
- Unicode RTL Handling
- Scripting/Macro Integration
- Cocoa application
- Open/Save .doc
- Open/Save Open XML doc format
- Unicode Glyph Insertion Dialog
- CPU usage in background
- Customizeable keyboard shortcuts
- Customizeable toolbars
- Copy/Paste Style
- Style Management
- Find/Replace Style
- Tracking Changes Feature
- Find/Replace Ignore Diacritics
- Outline View
- TOC Generation
- Cross Referencing Feature
- Index Generation
- Hideable Field Codes
- Check Spelling by Language
- Secondary Font Substitution Choice
- Noncontiguous selection
- Full screen mode
- Split view
- Text Flow Around Images/Objects
