<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">Three programs stand out in the Mac word processing world:</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">Strongest "Open Source" word processing choice seems to be NeoOffice. It does a great impersonation of MS Word. It's also pretty slow, but for the price of a free download you can't have everything.<BR></FONT><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><A href="http://www.neooffice.org">http://www.neooffice.org</A>/</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>To install and run NeoOffice, you must have the following:</FONT></P><UL><LI style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">Mac OS X 10.3 or higher</FONT></LI><LI style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">384 MB of memory</FONT></LI><LI style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">400 MB of free disk space</FONT></LI></UL><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">Strongest "Pay" word processing choices are Pages (part of iWork) and Nisus Writer Express, both $79. A demo version of the latter can be found below. A trial version of iWork is on new Macs, but I'm not sure if they are otherwise available. I'll just link the web advertising for it. A new version of Pages will likely be released in January, so it would be unwise to buy a copy before then.</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"> </FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><A href="http://www.nisus.com/Express/">http://www.nisus.com/Express/</A></FONT></DIV><UL><LI style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">Mac OS X </FONT></SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><B><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">10.3.9</FONT></B></SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"> or later*</FONT></SPAN></SPAN></LI><LI style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">G3, G4, G5 PowerPC or Intel-based Macintosh</FONT></LI></UL><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 10px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>*Mac OS X 10.4 is needed for full support of right to left text input</FONT></P><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><A href="http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/">http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/</A></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#484F41"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">iWork ’06 requires Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or v10.4.3 or later, a Macintosh computer with a 500 MHz or faster PowerPC G4, PowerPC G5 or Intel Core processor, 256 MB of RAM (512MB recommended), 32MB of video RAM, QuickTime 7.0.3 or later, and a DVD drive required for install.</FONT></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">john</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>