Mariner Write 3.5.1 review

There are few people in the world who require the power and feature set of Microsoft's Word, yet, through sheer force of will, it has become the de facto standard wordprocessor on the Mac.

However, if you don't need the more esoteric features of Word, there are other options available, and one of these products is Mariner Write.

Mariner Write attempts to tread the middle way between the feature-laden Word and the basic and decidedly under-powered TextEdit. It includes the vast majority of features that Word users need, such as styles, tables, formatting options and headers and footers, while eschewing the more esoteric ones, such as group collaboration and version control.

The interface is clean and easy to understand, and unlike Word it doesn't suffer from a complex preferences set up. Importantly it can read Word files natively, although it writes to RTF or its own Mariner Write format. There's no HTML export, but then again in many years of using Word, we've never found anyone that actually uses that feature in anger.

This latest update improves the Word import features by adding support for importing documents using non-Roman character sets, as well as other import improvements.

Word import works with styles correctly transferred into Mariner Write's Styles pop-up menu. However, we found that although the formatting and names of each style were transferred, the correct styles were not applied to each section of text - instead, it assumed the 'No style' style. This meant restyling each section.

Stylish behaviour

Overall, though, Mariner Write's implementation of styles is almost faultless, including such essential features as the ability to define which style follows the current one, tabs, bullets, and virtually everything else. You can also give styles a shortcut key, which makes things quicker. A minor annoyance is that although the Find and Replace feature has an option to search by style, this actually only allows you to replace instances of a font or other formatting feature, rather than swapping styles.

There are a few other minor areas of fault with Mariner Write. First, there is the lack of a keyboard shortcut for deleting back one word, and the lack of a live word count - a feature professional writers find invaluable. The lack of back-delete means you have to use the mouse to delete chunks of text, which means moving your hands away from the keyboard and thus slowing down your typing rate.

More serious is the lack of any automatic way of removing double spaces. For simple documents double spaces are not a problem, but for anything to be flowed into QuarkXPress or InDesign, they become more of an issue. You can do a simple find and replace at the end of producing a document, but this should really be automated.

We also had some occasional problems with screen redraw under Mac OS X, particularly when typing took you over from one page to another. All the text would remain visible, but the gap between the pages in Page Layout View would disappear. These redraw problems also manifested themselves as an occasional sluggishness when typing in the middle of a long paragraph. We suspected this was due to OS X's text smoothing, but turning this off in Mariner Write's View menu made little difference. However, these problems only manifested themselves if you had magnified the text.

Despite these minor problems, a week of working exclusively with Mariner Write left us liking the product a lot, and missing virtually nothing from Word. For writing documents up to a few thousand words, there's more than enough in Mariner Write to do a good job, and its speed and small memory footprint will be a big bonus to anyone on a slower older Mac. Mariner Software has shown with this product that low-cost alternatives to Word don't have to be underpowered.