Web Worker Daily

Sure, Microsoft Word and Pages are rich applications that can handle very complex documents, and GoogleDocs is widely used and liked, but sometimes word processing needs are specialized. Do you frequently hop in and out of a text editor such as WordPad? Do you write blog posts directly within a blogging application? Do you fret over shelling out lots of money for desktop publishing software? It’s very likely that you can improve on all these ideas for free, or very nearly so. In this post, I’ll round up five top-notch word processing tools, most of which are completely free.

Especially if you already use a word processor within a suite of open-source software, such as OpenOffice.org’s Writer, you may be pleasantly surprised by AbiWord. It’s a free download, and if you work on a cross-platform basis with other web workers, there are versions for the Mac, Windows, Linux and Unix-based operating systems such as Solaris.

AbiWord shines at quick-and-dirty word processing tasks where you don’t want the bloat of loading a larger word processor, but you do want features you won’t get in text editors such as Windows Notepad and the like. It does a very nice job with tables (from the Insert menu, just pick Table and specify how many rows and columns you want).

It also has a a very Windows-like interface complete with toolbars that resemble those found in Windows and Mac applications. It’s compatible with Word’s .doc file format and many other formats.

If you want to do more advanced things for larger projects, but don’t want to shell out for costly suite software, OpenOffice.org’s Writer is a good choice. It takes longer to load than a product like AbiWord, but it’s capable of very complex documents, auto-formatting, tables of contents, direct connections to your e-mail software and more. The OpenOffice.org suite is free and cross-platform.

Do you do any blogging? If so, Ecto is a blogging client for Mac OS X and Windows that offers useful integration with almost all popular blogging applications, including WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, TypePad, SquareSpace and more. In it, you can compose your blog posts offline, using features such as spell-checking, on-the-fly link creation, attachments and more, then just port your entry directly into your favorite blog publishing application. There is a 21-day free trial for this application, but if you like it it costs $17.95.

If your document creation needs call for tasks where you would typically reach for a desktop publishing program, you may find all you need in PagePlus SE. It’s great for simple desktop publishing tasks. If you need higher-end features than it provides, such as photo optimization, PDF exporting, and web publishing, PagePlus SE has a big brother, PagePlus 9 that costs only $9.99.

Lastly, I’m a big fan of the TextCrawler utility. It lets you either find or do a find-and-replace on text strings across multiple files. It has a preview window so that you can see your matches in context before you do a replace. If you frequently work with multiple files at once, it’s very handy.

For example, I frequently have a version of a blog post I’m working on in one word processor, and another closely matched version of the post up in a text editor (before I drop files into a blogging application I finalize it in a text editor, so I don’t introduce funky formatting into the blogging app). With TextCrawler, I can easily keep the two versions of the same document matched up. TextCrawler is free.

Do you have any good tips on alternative word processing tools?