Yes it's happened again! I've changed my mind again!
I was already to splash out my hard earned cash for my copy of Mariner Write, but then something happened....
What, what! I hear you ask. Well let me take you back to a few days ago....
I was browsing through some old macdevcenter articles, when I came across this little pice about, the latex typesetting system. Now for those of you who don't know what latex is, it is a plain text markup language, in the same way that HTML is a markup language. Where HTML describes the layout of text on a screen (normally), latex is used for printed text (again normally).
Now I had played around with one of the programs mentioned in article, iTextMac, but things never got futher than doing a few very small test documents. While reading the article, it occurred to me that latex could be the answer to my word processing needs. Quite often while I'm typing away at something, I get distracted because the text doesn't look right and I break my flow and go back a fiddle with the fonts or adjust the rulers etc. Now while I'm programing, which admittedly is a different kettle of fish, I don't get those sorts of things happen, simply because a text editor doesn't have those sorts of options (I do still worry about tabs and indentation, but thats another story). So I tried the idea suggested in the article of using a standard text editor (in my case either TextMate or TextWrangler) for 'normal' document tasks.
It worked for me! I did find less distractions helped the flow of writing.
So Mariner Write, I'm afraid has gone to the Trash, and I'm try TexShop and iTeXMac as my 'word processors'. Or maybe that should be document processors.
This isn't going to be my normal style shoot out, both are probably make their home on my hard drive for good, after all they are both free!
I don't claim to be any tex gru yet, I'm still converting all of my documents over, but I am learning.