Hands on: Using Google's online word processor

Over the years this column has been drafted on a number of word processors besides Word, including Star Office, Wordperfect, Ability Write and the near-moribund Lotus Word Pro.

But this is the first time I have used a word processor that isn’t installed on my PC. Writely – from the people who brought you Google – is a word processor that you use online in your web browser.

The good news is that it’s free to use, with a painless sign-up procedure. There are limits to the free beta accounts, such as 500KB for each document and 2MB for embedded images. But there’s no limit on the number of documents you can store.

You can collaborate on a document so that several people can edit it at the same time, which is either wonderful or totally confusing, depending on your needs and point of view.

Through an oversight I was stuck with the name ‘Untitled’ for my first Writely attempt. Then I discovered you can change the title in a box on the status bar. The ‘Save as...’ lets you save a copy to your own hard disk in Word, Open Office, Pdf and Rtf formats.

Although the facilities don’t compete with the established offline heavyweights, you can do most editing and formatting tasks, create tables, and insert images of up to 2MB. There’s a Word-style spelling checker that underlines mistakes, including the word Writely, in red. There are styles, a selection of 18 fonts, coloured text, and numbered or bulleted lists.

It’s not the only online word processor – others include Zoho Writer and Thinkfree. At the time of writing, both of these were also free, and you could join immediately. Thinkfree is rather more ambitious, and offers a whole Java-powered suite of Microsoft Office-compatible applications.

For about the past 10 years we’ve been hearing about online storage and applications being the coming thing. Now it appears to be happening. I don’t think I’d want to use it for mission-critical or high-security documents, but Writely is easy to use and great fun.

Font collections
Anyone who uses a Windows word processor will be familiar with Truetype (.ttf) fonts. They’ve been around since Windows 3.1 and provide a means of scaling type to any size and to the best capabilities of the output device, be it screen or printer. The Truetype technology was developed by Apple, believe it or not, as a rival to Adobe’s Type One or Postscript fonts.

A more recent arrival is the Open Type font, which also have the .ttf extension. This technology was a joint effort by Microsoft and Adobe to develop an open-standard successor to both Type One and Truetype, and these fonts are equally at home on Windows, Macintosh and most Unix or Linux systems.

So far, so good, but if you look in your fonts folder, you might discover yet another format with the .ttc extension. So what are these? TTC stands for Truetype Collection and, as the name suggests, these files can contain more than one font.

The idea behind this is to avoid redundancy. If two fonts share a number of identical glyphs (the actual shapes seen on screen or in print) then it makes sense to combine them. This is common in Japanese fonts where several fonts may have different kana glyphs, but share identical kanji glyphs.

Nearer home, the Cambria & Cambria Math collection (cambria.ttc) that comes with the Office 2007 Beta share many glyphs. But different spacing, so combining them in one file, saves having to define identical glyphs in separate files. You can find out more at microsoft.com/ OpenType/OTSpec/otff.htm.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!