Comments on: A Comprehensive Review of Word Processors

By: Tom Colvin

Tom Colvin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:15:37 +0000

Zaine, thanks for yr observations. Seems to me that you just gave a ringing endorsement to RTF!

In case you’ve missed it, I’ve just posted a link to PageFour’s brand-new page of reviews and testimonials. You may wish to see what others are saying about the program.

I also plan to take a look into the mega-review of NoteTakers and will eventually post my comments so that my readers will know to check out that article as well.

By: Zaine Ridling

Zaine Ridling — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:12:17 +0000

Tom, I’m grateful for your recommendation of DonationCoder.com’s Word Processor Review, and I appreciate what it lacked. There was much I wanted to include in it, but as you know, once mega-reviews like that get started, it’s difficult to finish if you don’t limit them at some point. I wanted to include word processors for the GNU/Linux and OS X platforms, but did not have the time or resources.

RTF is not a bad format, but it’s both a limited 7-bit that requires “escape sequences” to encode characters beyond mere ASCII, and RTF is proprietary format owned by Microsoft. A key concern of any writer should be document and data integrity that is not beholden to any single vendor. For example, I’ve got articles, research titles, papers, and various monographs going back to 1981, in a wide variety of formats. Oh if only I had all of them in simple text format (which in the end, is what RTF is, and what makes RTF so attractive), then I could import past writings into any container application and just reformat at most.

Also, thank you for your list of writer’s programs. I’d like to study those more. I was unaware of Page Four! Take care, and I hope others enjoy the review, too.

By: app103

app103 — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 23:35:49 +0000

Zaine’s review may have been missing the smaller note taking applications but they aren’t missing altogether. There is a review on the same site by another author. Take a look at Part 1 of the Note Taking Software Roundup

And the huge forum discussion that lead to it is quite an interesting read, with participation from a few of the developers of the note taking applications.

It is the longest running, most active thread on their forum, begun in February of 2006, with over 500 replies and over 47,000 views….and it’s still going strong.

It was that discussion that lead to my discovery of their website. I was on a quest for a very specialized note taking application and came across that thread on a Google search.