Mac help
 

Hi,

I am the so called "IT" guy at work. My boss recently bought an Imac as a new home computer so he can use Garageband. He just asked me to recommend some office software for him.

On his office PC he uses MS Publisher and Adobe Acrobat. Besides Acrobat for Mac, what desktop publishing software would work. He doesn't do any high end stuff, so just the basics will do. Is there an open source PDF writing tool for the Mac instead of paying a fortune for Adobe Acrobat?

Thanks for all the help. My last Mac experience was with OS 9.

Neil - I'd start him off with MS Office for OS X. All of its programs can write to PDF format. If he outgrows it, there are lots of publishing tools for the Mac that are higher-end, like Quark Express, but they are pricey.

OpenOffice.org! (www.openoffice.org) Native for Mac, Windows, Linux, and god knows what else. Document compatable with MS Office. Creates PDF files (and Flash files) with just a few clicks.

Oh, and it is free (as in beer) and Free (as in speech/Libre). Gotta love that Open Source software.

Tangent: it's difficult to quickly read the above sentances, regardless of the response........ or the mentality.... such as mine.

Please leave a line between DIFFERENT concepts. Thx

Openoffice still runs in X11.app on OS X. It is not a native Aqua application, so it will not look or feel the same as any other OS X application. This may cause difficulty with folks who aren't computer-savvy.

I still use it, though, because I'm a "power" user and a cheap bastard to boot.

PDF is native in OSX...from ANY application. Click print, and when the dialog box comes up there is a button for "save as pdf". So you can use any software you want and output a pdf...no need for Acrobat.

For page layout, Word in a pinch. You can use Keynote (Apple's version of PowerPoint) as it has pretty good layout capabilities (especially for text). I use Photoshop or GraphicConverter or OmniGraffle for page layout depending on what I need to do.