11-28-2007, 05:34 PM
Another reason to stick with Office X, Word X gives you the option to enable or disable Quartz text smoothing. This is a big deal if you typically work at higher zoom/screen magnifications and don't want the blurry effect that text smoothing gives in such circumstances.
I usually work at 200% zoom in Word on a 20 inch widescreen monitor, and with smoothing turned off in Word X the 12 pt text is razor sharp. Word 2004 doesn't offer the no-smoothing option, instead using the global text smoothing setting configured in the Mac OSX Appearance control panel. And if you "turn off font smoothing for text sizes 12 pts and smaller" a lot of your smaller (e.g., web browser) text will look like crap.
I installed Office 2004 this morning, discovered this font smoothing limitation (not to mention the idiotic "corrupt font" problem that afflicts Word 2004) and immediately uninstalled Office 2004.
I'll use Office 2004 on one of my laptops for occasional use, plus I'm getting the $100 rebate and a free copy of Office 2008 for my Intel iMac, so overall I'm not too put out. But after all these years working on Office for the Mac and they still can't get it right... If I didn't have to use Word for my business I'd switch to Mariner Write in a heartbeat.
I usually work at 200% zoom in Word on a 20 inch widescreen monitor, and with smoothing turned off in Word X the 12 pt text is razor sharp. Word 2004 doesn't offer the no-smoothing option, instead using the global text smoothing setting configured in the Mac OSX Appearance control panel. And if you "turn off font smoothing for text sizes 12 pts and smaller" a lot of your smaller (e.g., web browser) text will look like crap.
I installed Office 2004 this morning, discovered this font smoothing limitation (not to mention the idiotic "corrupt font" problem that afflicts Word 2004) and immediately uninstalled Office 2004.
I'll use Office 2004 on one of my laptops for occasional use, plus I'm getting the $100 rebate and a free copy of Office 2008 for my Intel iMac, so overall I'm not too put out. But after all these years working on Office for the Mac and they still can't get it right... If I didn't have to use Word for my business I'd switch to Mariner Write in a heartbeat.