Monday, January 15, 2024

SoftMaker Office

I liked SoftMaker FreeOffice enough that I went ahead and bought SoftMaker Office.  After all the years of using never-quite-finished open source software, SoftMaker Office and FreeOffice have a level of polish that I'm not used to on my Linux box. (It fits right in on my Mac, and there's a Windows version too.)

The only serious complaint I have with TextMaker—the word processor—is that it doesn't have a wordcount field you can put in the document and have it live-updated.

Seriously?  Seriously.

Wordcount is readily available, right down in the status bar of TextMaker, and I can copy-paste it into the document readily enough. It's just weird that it's missing. That's been my experience with TextMaker (and FreeOffice) to date: works great, stable, but sometimes there's an odd thing missing and it takes time in Google to either find the allegedly missing feature, or devise a workaround. It also takes probably thirty seconds to a minute to load a 98000 word novel. This is acceptable, if not ideal. Once the novel is loaded, performance is fine.

Still. A hundred dollar one-time-payment for an office suite? Worth every dime. Strongly recommended.

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