Need graphics app for music reference sheets

[MIDI Life Crisis]

WordPerfect 5.1 was the best.

[mikehalloran]

BTW, you're entirely wrong about Word 5.1. WordPerfect 5.1 was the best.

I won't argue with that...

being the funniest thing I have read all day!

[bayswater]

WordPerfect 5.1 was the best.

I bet you used WordStar.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Nope. I used Word Perfect but never found it to be better than Word. It's been a very long time and I remember liking it, but towards the end of it's Mac life, I also remember it being really a PITA. Of course, it depends on what you were doing. I loved using PageMaker and don't really enjoy InDesign very much. Never touched Wordstar.

[billf]

For many years I've used to (and still do occasionally) use AppleWorks to create music reference sheets for my music students. These include things like guitar scale/chord sheets, practice cycles, conversion tables, blank tabs, manuscript, rhythm exercises, etc. etc. Lots of variety.

AppleWorks just did all this work very well and reliably.

Pages is terrible for this kind of thing. Though it has some cool new features; it crashes all the time, no snap-grid, dragging multiple shapes is broken. MS Word is even worse, very unstable. Shapes & images just vanish from view, also very slow.

What I need is an affordable mac app that allows me to add shapes, text boxes (any font), position images, draw lines; and be able to move, copy/paste, all of the above with great freedom & precision. It should be easy to add new pages to a single document, drag duplicates of text & shapes between subsequent pages. And above all have a highly configurable ruler/snap-grid. For example, if I have a bunch of lines on the page, to be able to select only the left end of multiple lines, and drag them all relative to their current positions. -- which brings up another point, ease at selecting shapes that might be overlapping or covered.

AppleWorks is still the best program I've ever used for this kind of work. Even though it wasn't perfect, it still works WAY better than Pages or Word.

If I get into the world if Photoshop, it seems like over-kill for cost & features.

Anyone have any suggestions for me?


Thank you!!!

AppleWorks was great. I really miss that program. Anyway, if you are still looking for modern graphics apps that don't cost a lot, and might be closer to what you are looking for, here are a couple of open source options to try that are very good and very well supported (regular updates and new features).

1. GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ (for general users it rivals Photoshop)

2. LibreOffice (more of a proper replacement for AppleWorks and/or MS Office) https://www.libreoffice.org/

[bayswater]

Nope. I used Word Perfect but never found it to be better than Word.

Of course, you're right. WordPerfect was something I used for so long, I didn't have to think about it. But the transition to a GUI from text was not elegant

Never touched Wordstar.

Lucky. It was truly awful and favoured by Dogberts everywhere.

[stubbsonic]

Thanks, billf. I had tried Libre long ago, and GIMP more recently. Will look at those again.

iStudio is ok, but has some glitchy behavior and some workflow things that don't work for me. I could probably adapt to it, as it has a few big features that are useful (like working in spread/booklet mode) and some others.

Pixelmator was just too hard to see (teeny tiny interface elements). Didn't work like I wanted it to. No demo for iDraw, but that looks promising-- at least for making some graphical elements.

And thanks, Mike for linking to the Macintosh Garden. That will be fascinating to explore!! Not sure what I'll be able to run on that G4, but might be fun to use some of those.

[mikehalloran]

You'll be surprised. Most don't know or don't remember that you can install OS 9.1 on an OS 10.2--10.4 partition on a G3 or G4. So not only do you have Classic available but you can boot the same file in both OS (if possible). With some file types that were created in OS 6-8, you open in 9, save and then can open in an X compatible app. Encore is complicated like that.

A 9.0 CD will not install onto a G4. It has to be 9.1 or 9.2. Fortunately, the disk image is easy to find nowadays.

[stubbsonic]

Since I keep everything, I know I have all the OS 9 installers somewhere in the heap.