I don't follow the field too closely, but try to keep a half-open eye for my particular interest, which is Arabic support. Papyrus never made that, but used to have a very funny bug where everything wrote apparently correctly, only backwards. Anyway, even that disappeared, also in the latest German, and it seems there is no development there.

Mellel is alive and kicking, and brings out new versions with some frequency, there was I think an update not too long ago. I didn't download it (Arabic worked fine in the previous), so I cannot say what novelties there were.

Mariner Write didn't do Unicode or Arabic, so of no interest to me. I do get Mariner ads through some non-filtered spams, but not recently for Write, I think? But lack of Unicode would indicate they are not working terribly hard on it. AbiWord could be an open-source alternative, but again, not for me (Arabic support is intended, but doesn't work), and again there does not seem to be much development in that community.

In this region of general word processors smaller than the Offices, bigger than Bean and iText, Nisus and Mellel seem to be it, as far as I can see.

Knut


Den 14. feb. 2011 kl. 02:46 skrev Geoffrey Heard:

> I know one that could have been a competitor -- Papyrus. It's just came to a dead stop in
> English at v.12.5 in about 2005 (I think) with some obvious improvements needed, while it has moved up to v.17 in German. I've been following it because I was interested in its database function ("was" beibng the operative term here).
> 
> But what of Mellel, mariner Writer, etc? Are they upgrading? Are they bashing down people's doors?
>