It’s a new semester at school and OH GOD! I have to decide which word processor to use this Spring.

If you have been following my blogs on the subject (which you probably haven’t, because I stopped publicly complaining about this topic last fall). I have a problem with word processors. I haven’t found the one to call my own yet. I started with Abiword, but some bugs, like crashing when large image files are added, turned me off of it. Then I strayed to Mozilla Composer, which has no problem with images and makes beautiful tables, but won’t print accurately worth a darn. It can also write some really ugly html code. Now I’ve gone to OpenOffice.org Writer, which looks good for the moment, but I’m still having some formatting problems with it that I have to sort out.

Last semester was a mess. I had files in all three word processors, and I couldn’t tell where anything was. I would search for a file in Abiword and it defaults to showing only Abiword files and I couldn’t find the file that I knew I wrote. Then I’d remember that I wrote it in composer and it’s an HTML file and the page breaks… what page breaks? Well, you get the idea.

So I resolved that this spring I would pick one wordprocessor and stick to it, but which one? I’m leaning toward Writer, but I can’t give up on the tables in Composer or the print to pdf feature in Abiword. Sometimes free software leaves you with a diversity of riches, and a problem deciding which software to choose. But it’s still good to have choices.

I think that I’ll see which program can make a template for multiple choice test questions that prints properly without splitting the answers on different pages. If Writer can do that, then I can say I’ve finally found the wordprocessor for me. At least… I think so.