Mariner Write 3.6
Review

Mariner Write 3.6
Company: Mariner Software
Price: $79.95 Boxed Edition: $69.95 Download Edition

Upgrade Price: $24.95 for all pre-3.0 users of Mariner Write
Lifetime Upgrade Plan: For a one-time fee of $49.95, Mariner customers will receive every major upgrade for the life of the product.

I’ve wanted to try Mariner Write to see how things have changed since the last time My Mac reviewed it. (1998) Mariner Write has grown up in the past several years and is turning out to be quite a well-done product.

To start off with, Mariner Write does not include the kitchen sink and all the bells and whistles that MS Word has built in its product. It is a small, fast and easy-to- use word processor that does an excellent job of handling your word processing needs. The tool bar is customizable to the user, can be horizontal or vertical and positioned anywhere on the screen and you can create new button sets for the tool bar. Mariner Write contains an 80,000-word spell checker that will go over your document, learning the words you want it to and offering suggestions for the ones that you’ve misspelled.

I have spent my time with Mariner Write making new documents, saving them as RTF, Word documents, PDFs, TeachText, inserting columns, tables and graphics. It has been able to handle every Word document that I’ve thrown at it, and every document that I’ve typed and saved as a Word document is fine when opened in MS Word. I’ve printed my documents out and not found any problems with the results. Even this review was typed on Mariner Write and then saved as a Word document.

Mariner Write is able to handle style sheets, tables and deal with graphics being inserted into the document. Heck, you want to Mail Merge to automate your next mailing, go right ahead, Mariner Write can handle it. It’s easy to start right up with Mariner Write as soon as you open the application and start to work. Some of the new features in version 3.6 are:

• Font Panel
• Find Dialog
• Spelling Dialog with relevance rating
• Insert Symbol Dialog
• Hierarchical Font Menu
• “Show only Roman fonts” option –improves WYSIWYG font menu performance
• Page Numbering
• Text color & background color buttons
• Live resizing in the main window and several others
• Multiple language localization
• Multiple language dictionaries (80,000+ word dictionary)

The one problem that I did encounter with Mariner Write was not in dealing with a regular word document but in trying to deal with a document with embedded graphics. Try as I might, Mariner Write just could not open it. (Neither could the other non-Word word processors that I tried it on) Since it’s a Word document, I thought that there wouldn’t be a problem. I contacted Mariner Write, sent them a copy of the document and quickly heard back from them. Logan Ryan, Director of Marketing responded back that:

I guess it just goes to show that Microsoft can afford to produce Word by spending millions and millions and having a company size group of people assigned to work on it, while the smaller companies have to do what they can with the resources that are available to them.

I’ve checked with Mariner Software and Mariner Write has not experienced any problems with the latest release of MS Office. The only compatibility issue that has occurred was with Spell Catcher but they have corrected the problem and it will be taken care of with the release of version 3.6.1 due out this week.

Good Points –
FAST, ease of use, can save a document as both Word and Mariner Write RTF, Text, SimpleText, TeachText and PDF, uses less then 3 MB of RAM, is NOT Microsoft Word, requires only 4 MB of hard drive space.

Cons –
Does not do HTML, has a problem with documents that have embedded graphics, is NOT Microsoft Word, some users may balk at the price.

System Requirements:
• Two megabytes memory (RAM), 4 MB free hard disk space
• System 9.0 – 10.1.5 (version 3.0-3.5.1) or Mac OS 10.2 or later (version 3.6 or later)

My Mac Rating: 4 out of 5.
If you are looking for a word processor that is does a great job, this is the program for you.

Download the free 30-day demo version; give it a try for yourself.