I finally gave in and ordered AppleWorks 6.2 from the Apple Store. Why did I do this? I already have Microsoft Word running in Classic and an excellent text editor in BBEdit Lite running in Mac OS X. Unfortunately, they don't meet my specific needs. For one, I need a small amount of page layout capabilities -- not just multiple columns, but also the ability to place tables and pictures amid flowing text. The other requirement I have is the ability to print to PDF.

The second requirement eliminates all Classic applications, unless I buy a Classic PDF creator, which I don't particularly want to do. Conversely, every Mac OS X application that can print, can then print to PDF via Mac OS X's print preview function. PDF is an incredibly nice way to distribute formatted files. Well, not just formatted files, but documents that are layed out and not just simple text files. Sure, they're big files and Acrobat Reader is not a svelte and quick application, nor universal. But I don't see any other way to do it other than PostScript, and there aren't good PostScript viewers for most platforms (GhostScript is not a *good* PostScript viewer, capable but not that easy to install and use).

Although there are some cheap PDF creators for various platforms, none of them are all that capable. Good for simple documents but not good enough say to transfer an RPG manual to electronic form. You need Acrobat Distiller or some other pricey solution. Until Mac OS X included it in the Quartz layer. Now, this is an important point, PDF is a foundation for Quartz, and to easily print to PDF you need to run an application under Quartz. It won't work in the Classic environment. It won't work under X-Windows. It has to be in Mac OS X's native display environment, Quartz.

So now we've narrowed it down to a native or Carbon word processing application for Mac OS X. Word processing is not quite the right term, word processing with page layout. A strict page layout application has very poor word processing facilities. From the list of software on Version Tracker, most developers think word processing means a text editor that can do fonts. A real word processor is more than just fonts, unfortunately that is very hard to do and understandably there are few word processors out there, especially shareware offerings.

Shareware is out. That leaves the commercial offerings, of which there are two with at least one more coming. There's Microsoft Word X which is a huge behemoth that does a lot of things. Just about everybody complains that Word is too big and bloated and expensive and slow (depends on the version). But if you want to write a book, Word is the best word processor to do that. None of the other offerings have enough features to do that well.

But it is expensive, way too expensive in fact. Microsoft has priced Word X to encourage people to just buy Office, $400 new versus $500 for office (in fact, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are all $400 each). Much too much for me, and I'm not the upgrade type either ($300 for Office, $150 for Word). Besides, Microsoft is getting closer and closer to a subscription fee for its software. I don't want to pay a yearly fee or have my software disabled, so I'd rather not depend on Microsoft products.

Write Now (remember Nisus Software?) for Mac OS X will be out some time in the far future, as Nisus is working on a Cocoa version. But my needs are rather immediate so there's only AppleWorks left. I've used it before to page layout a nice little booklet, so I know it's capable. It does the basic things I need and it's only $80, though it's funny that the Apple Store has it at the same price for both the boxed version and the downloadble version. Excuse me, I want a box and I'm willing to wait a week for it. Downloaded software is a bit harder to sell, since it's already pre-registered and I'm always afraid that all copies of it will be lost because of hard disk failure (multiple failures to be sure, and I should be more afraid of fire, but still...).