Looking for a mac word processor with French language support to replace Word

March 2, 2007 3:45 AM

I'm looking for a mac word processor with French language support (spelling and grammar) to replace Microsoft Word 2004.

I'm studying French and find that Microsoft Word's built-in French grammar check helps me catch a lot of careless errors (accord, proper use of subjunctive, etc.), but since Word runs through Rosetta on my macbook it's a major resource hog and a bit too buggy for writing compositions.

I'm specifically interested in a native (Cocoa) application - not run through X11 or Windows through emulation/virtualization. The formatting doesn't have to be great as long as it has rich-text support. I'd also be open to any suggestions for applications solely designed for grammar checking should such a program not exist.

posted by Frankieist to writing & language (8 comments total)

Online French grammar & spelling checker
posted by rom1 at 4:08 AM on March 2, 2007

Check out Mellel (I've linked directly to the language support page).

I don't require alternate language support with it, but it has replaced Word for me in word processing on a Mac.
posted by stefnet at 5:07 AM on March 2, 2007

I can't help you with the grammar checker, but I know a lot of people who are happy with Mellel for a word processor.
posted by -t at 5:15 AM on March 2, 2007

Office 2008 comes out in a few months, but I had the same experience as you and it all went away once I went from one gig of ram to two. You might want to look into that if it applies to your situation.
posted by furtive at 5:40 AM on March 2, 2007

You could take another approach and use pretty much any word processor with Antidote. There's a list of programs it integrates with quite seamlessly and you can use it with any program via copy/paste.

In my experience Antidote is miles ahead of any built-in WP language tools.
posted by mikel at 6:08 AM on March 2, 2007 [2 favorites]

Second Antidote - I was about to suggest it. It will integrate with MS Office, with any Cocoa app, and eat pretty much anything RTF, so I suppose you could use LaTeX.
posted by stereo at 6:20 AM on March 2, 2007

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Antidote. I was checking out Grammatica, but Antidote looks like a much better tool for my purposes.
posted by Frankieist at 8:00 AM on March 2, 2007

Antidote sounds interesting...for awhile I used the correcteur 101 for grammar checking and it seemed to work pretty well. The latest version is called "the bilingual corrector v2". It claims to have os x support, but it might only be through classic so I would check that out before purchasing.

The review of Antitode is pretty thorough and even does a little comparison with the correcteur. If you can live w/out a thesaurus, it looks like Antitode might be the better choice.
posted by timelord at 11:08 AM on March 2, 2007