Completely Rewritten Bean 3 Free Word Processor Released
Bean 3 is a small, easy-to-use and free rich text editor and lightweight word processor designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable.
Lean, fast and uncluttered, Bean starts up quickly, has a live word count, page layout mode, full-screen mode, regular expression search/replace, multi-column text, inline graphics, detailed statistics, and much more, and its user interface is easy on the eyes. While MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people, sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That’s Bean’s niche. For example, Bean doesn’t do footnotes or use stylesheets and is only partially compatible with Word’s file formats. Also, it allows in-line graphics, but not floating graphics.
Bean also supports spell-checking, including as-you-type flagging, by piggybacking OS X’s built in spell check function, and you get a live, running readout of word, character, and page counts at the bottom margin of the window, which is shared by a handy text zoom slider.
If you need more document information than the running readouts provide, just summon the Info panel, which can be accessed from a button in the toolbar.
One Bean text-editing feature that is much appreciated by me is the View menu’s Show/Hide Layout command, which facilitates dispensing with WYSIWYG formatting and working with just unformatted text. It can also be toggled with a toolbar button.
There is a serviceable and searchable online Help manual.
New in Version 3 are an optional single-window tabbed interface layout, template documents with boilerplate text, a split view, a two-up layout view, freeform headers and footers, plain text editing, and other improvements.
Bean features:
• live word count
• make template documents with boilerplate text
• free-form headers and footers
• page layout view (optional 2-up)
• alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
• split-window editing
• full screen editing
• date-stamped backups
• selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
• find panel allows regular expressions (pattern matching)
• all of Cocoa’s good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)
Bean natively reads and writes these file formats:
• .rtf format (rich text)
• .rtfd format (rich text with graphics)
• .bean format (identical to .rtfd)
• plain text (Unicode and legacy)
• .webarchive format (Apple’s web archive format)
Bean transparently imports and exports these formats:
• .doc format (MS Word ’97, minus images, margins, and page size)…more info here
• .docx format (Word 2007, minus images and some formatting)…more info here
• .odt format (OpenDocument, minus images, margins, and page size)
Bean can export all of the above formats to these formats:
• .html (web page format)
• .doc compatible (with images intact)
New in Version 3.0.1:
• Totally rewritten, with many new features. Requires OS X 10.5+
• Drag-resize of edit view in draft mode now works (oops).
• Tabbed editing
• Ability to resize the width of the draft edit view within its window
• Plain text editing
System requirements:
• Bean requires a Mac with a PPC or Intel processor running OS X 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, or 10.7 Lion
• An older version (2.4.5) is still available compatible with OS X Tiger 10.4+
For more information, visit:
http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html
