Textmaker... Hello!?

I hate OpenOffice Writer. A program that forces styles upon you that you don't want... Well, I've already written about that.

So I downloaded TextMaker. Because for all those confident statements about the 'thousands' of wonderful programs available for Linux, it turns out that OpenOffice and TextMaker are the only two full-featured word processors. (Forget AbiWord - it's a Mickey Mouse program that can't even manage smart, curly, quotes.) Yeah, that's right. Two word processors. TextMaker seems quite good to me. It's easier to fathom than OpenOffice and its attitude to styles is similar to that of Word - but with easier access to them than most versions of Word have provided.

The downloadable version is hobbled: no saving, no printing. You have to pay if you want it to work properly. It is quite pricey - cheeky, when you consider that its competition is entirely free of charge. However, there is a cheaper way to get it if you are a student or teacher. I am one of the latter and I duly emailed off a scanned document to prove this. All TextMaker have to do now is email me a code to unlock the missing features in their program.

I'm waiting. And waiting. And waiting...