Egword - it is no more

The following was written in November 2007 as a comparison between Apple's iWork application Pages and the Japanese word processor Egword. Just two months later, Egword was withdrawn from the market - hopefully not because of this article. I now remove it from the Pages FAQ, as it was of little use there, but it is kept here, in case someone is interested.

This is not at all a frequently asked question. In fact, it is rare to hear anyone talk about EGWORD outside Japan, but it is such a nifty word processor that it warrants a short review - especially as it is so similar to Pages in a lot of ways.

The good thing with EGWORD is that it is much more mature than Pages 3.0. It has been around since 1984 and its current version number is 16. It implements several features that have been requested for Pages since version 1, but which still are missing in Apple's product.

The bad thing for the vast majority of the potential customers, is that EGWORD is Japanese only. There are no menus in English or any other non-Japanese languages.

As it is a Japanese program, it of course supports standard Japanese features like vertical writing and furigana.

In the screenshot above you also see the chart module used. The two images are linked with a line with connectors. You can move the images around as much as you want on the page, but the logical connection stays. Pages lacks this functionality and is therefore less useful to create flow charts or organisation charts.

EGWORD provides easy access to multiple Inspectors. In the image below there are two Inspector windows open for the same image, so one can check both the size of the background image and the properties of the image shadow at the same time. The number of Inspectors is virtually unlimited, so you can get an overview of about any property of the picture and the surrounding text at the same time. Each Inspector window has a "New Inspector" icon, so it is easier to create one than in Pages, where one has to go through the menus View > New Inspector.



The following are some features that are available in both Pages and EGWORD but not in MS Word 2004:

• Latin alphabet ligatures.
  
• Advanced Japanese typography (Yes, Pages has it too, apart from furigana and vertical script.)
  
• Mac OS X Services support.
  
• Both Pages and EGWORD have Universal binaries, so they run as fast on Intel processors as on Power PC.
  

Limitations Pages and EGWORD share that Word does not have are

• Unusual file format. All three applications admittedly have proprietary file formats, and that is bad. Word's advantage is simply that it has the most common word processing file format in the world - it is a de facto standard. The best way to move a document between Pages 3.0 and EGWORD 2007 is through Word's .doc-format.
  
• Auto-save. Pages definitely lacks an auto-save function. Strangely enough I have not been able to find one in EGWORD either. MS Word has it. Even Blogspot's edit window has it. But not Pages or EGWORD.
  

EGWORD has the following functionality that is missing in Pages:

• Layers. You can add graphics and text boxes to different layers, and switch them on and off in different combinations to try out different layouts. Similar functionality exists in Photoshop and InDesign but not in MS Word.
  
• Page Spread view. You can display facing pages immediately next to each other so you can see a picture span two pages. In Pages you can view pages "two up", but there is a space between them, which makes it very difficult to adjust pictures over page spans.
  
• Japanese furigana (phonetic guides).
• Vertical text.
• Connectors for graphics to be used in flow charts and organisation charts.
• Outlines.
• Mix between portrait and landscape layouts in the same document.
• Password protection.
• Native Save to .doc format if original document was Word.
• Graphics: Arcs. Customisable reflections of images, text boxes and other shapes. In general EGWORD uses Mac OS X' graphics and text engines, just like Pages (but in contrast to MS Word), so the result is usually very impressive.
• The high end version of EGWORD also contains EGBRIDGE, a Japanese input method with handwriting recognition and other features that are not present in Apple's Kotoeri.
• A lot of more minor functionality.
  

A picture adjusted to span two pages.

And yet, there are certain features Pages has, that are missing from EGWORD:

• High quality PDFs. I have not been able to export EGWORD files in any high quality file format. It saves natively to .doc format, and it can export to .rtf and .rtfd, and it can print using Mac OS X to PDF, but the quality is slightly inferior to what you get when you create PDFs with Pages.
  
• Non-Japanese/non-English spell checking. Unfortunately EGWORD does not seem to be able to use Mac OS X' spell checker.
  
• Linked text boxes. This seems silly, but there seems to be no way to lead overflowing text from one textbox to another.
  
• Latin auto-text. For Japanese auto-text, EGWORD can use EGBRIDGE, if installed.
  
• Graphics: Instant Alpha. Adjust image. It could be argued that this kind of functionality is not Word processor or DTP functionality. If transparency is added to a picture in an external program, EGWORD is fully capable of using it for text wrapping.

There is a brief comparison between Pages and EGWORD in Japanese at Ergo's website. Ergosoft also has a comparison between Egword and Microsoft Word.

On the whole, neither program can be fully replaced by the other. EGWORD is very mature, and it has evolved a lot the last few years - perhaps more so than the much younger Pages. Unless you need really high quality graphics, EGWORD is the better of the two programs - provided you can read Japanese.

Prices in Japan November 2007:
EGWORD Universal 2 (with EGBRIDGE) - ￥16,000
EGWORD Universal 2 Solo (without EGBRIDGE) - ￥11,000
MS Office 2004 standard - ￥49,800
MS Word 2004 (separate from Office) - ￥27,800
iWork - ￥9,800

In the US, there is also a student edition of MS Office 2004 at $149.95 (￥16,000).

Update

Egword is no longer sold from 28 January 2008. Sadly, after 24 years in the market, this fine word processor is withdrawn.