[X4U] MS Office 2008 delayed

[Zane H. Healy]

At 7:04 PM -0700 8/4/07, Randy B. Singer wrote:
>On Aug 4, 2007, at 6:32 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

>>These are the two areas I'm most concerned with, along with spell 
>>checking and grammar checking.
>
>That's interesting.  What would you like to see improved about spell 
>checking and grammar checking?
>
>I don't care for Word's grammar checker myself, but I'm not sure 
>that I would find any grammar checker to be useful.  I really like 
>Word's inline spell checking, my only complaint is that it sometimes 
>forgets about my custom dictionaries and I have to remind the 
>program to use them.

I wasn't clear, I meant that my main use for MS Word is in preparing 
the documents I write for copying into Adobe InDesign.  As such the 
main features that I use are font support, the spell checker, and the 
grammar checker.  While typically the grammar checker is fairly 
worthless, it is the best I've used (which isn't saying much), and it 
does catch the occasional stupid mistake.

I have no complaints about the spell checker.  I'm especially fond of 
the ability to define certain words to auto-correct, such as a 
personal problem of mine, typing "the" as "hte".  The fact that it 
auto-checks spelling now and underlines words it believes to be 
spelled wrong is a massive step in the right direction for me.

>>I would really like to seen the font handling improved.  The sad 
>>thing is, this is one area where MS Word 2004 blows anything else 
>>I've tried away.
>
>How would you like to see it improved?

I'd like to be able to define a subset of the fonts installed on my 
system for use within specific documents.  Outside of those fonts, I 
don't care about the rest.  The "Favorites" in Apple Pages looks to 
come close to this.

I would also like to see it where when you go to the font menu all 
fonts of a specific family are grouped together and when you select 
that grouping it pops up a sub-menu.

Another nice to have would be the ability to turn off fonts I don't 
want to use.

>>What really gets me is that Apple Pages doesn't even seem to be 
>>able to handle OpenType fonts!
>
>I strongly suspect that when Leopard is released we will see a 
>vastly upgraded version of Pages.  Though I don't expect it to get 
>anywhere close to being a competitor for Word.  However it might be 
>a strong competitor for Nisus Pro.

I have hopes for the next version of Pages, I'll definitely be taking 
a look at it.  You've also reminded me, I'm really wanting to check 
out Nisus Pro.

		Zane


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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
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