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Why Word on the Mac is a Drag
While my normal and daily computing platform is Windows XP on the PC, I've also owned and used a G4 Powerbook for several years. I continue to have fits of rage at the ugliness of XP (and the slowness of Photoshop, but that's another entry) which keeps me trying the Mac from time to time.
When I first got my Powerbook about 3 years ago, one thing that drove me nuts was the display resolution in Microsoft Word. Text at "100%" in Word was way too small. Alternatively, on Windows XP, I find the text size to be just right. On the mac I always found myself squinting at the screen or increasing the magnification. The problem with increasing the mag, however, was that the text's kerning got wonky and the font looked bold. This was back when Word was on version "X" and OS X was version 10.1 or something like that.
I recently installed Tiger and Word 2004 on my Powerbook, and was eager to see if they had fixed this problem. While the text quality is improved, they forgot to fix the size problem. Here's the mac displaying Times New Roman at 12pt with 100% magnification in Word 2004 (click the image for a full-size screenshot):
Now here's the same text in the same font at the same mag in Word 2002 on XP:
What you can see is that the same font at the same size with the same mag is about 30% smaller on the mac than it is on the PC. But other interface elements are roughly the same--the title bar text and size, the buttons, the menus, etc.
Whats up with this!? Why is the text so much smaller, and who thinks this is a good idea?
I do a lot of collaborative writing in my work (for grants, papers, etc.) and as is becoming more and more common, academics are adopting the mac. One thing I've started to notice is how many Word docs I get from people that have the mag set higher than 100% when I open them up. In fact, pretty much everybody I know that I share Word docs with that uses the mac increases the magnification on their end.
This isn't surprising given my examples above. So why don't I just increase the mag and be done with it? Well, as I mentioned above, back in Word X, the kerning was bad and the font looked bold. So how about now? Here's the same text on the mac in Word 2004 with the mag at 135%:
They have improved (but not solved) the magnified kerning problem since Word X, but the bold font look is still there. I can't help but see this text as bold--so much so that bolded text doesn't stand out much.
So, its nice to see they worked on it some (and clearly saw it as a problem), but why not actually fix the problem?
My question to all those mac users out there is what mag do you use in Microsoft Word, and how can you stand it? It seems like everytime I try to use a Mac for a real-world purpose, I run into a show-stopper like this one. And don't suggest I use Apple's Pages or something like that. I need a real word processor with all the bells/whistles that is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Word because of the collaborative writing I do. I also try every OpenOffice version when it comes out and not a single one can handle even the simplest Word docs with embedded images without screwing it up.
I don't know who I should be blaming for this--Microsoft or Apple. I suppose it could be some contrived attempt by Microsoft to make Apple an inferior platform for word processing. If so, its successful. On the other hand, perhaps its Apple who hopes to squeeze Microsoft out? If thats the case then they don't understand the world of word processing very well.
Until things like this get fixed I'll never be able to actually use the mac as a replacement platform. Word processing is about the most basic and fundamental use for a computer, and for whatever reason the Mac can't handle it.
Posted on May 9, 2005 12:12 AM
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