Bean (word processor)
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Bean is a word processor for Mac OS X. Originally free and open source software Bean became closed source at version 3. However, the Bean executable is still distributed free of charge. According to its author, James Hoover, Bean is not meant to replace Microsoft Word, but to be a lean word processor that is beautiful and user friendly. Many of Bean's operations are carried out by the underlying
Cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...
framework of Mac OS X. The name ''Bean'' is a play on Cocoa and Java, two popular programming frameworks. After the release of Bean 3.2.2 in November 2012, Hoover announced that "active development of Bean will cease. Bean will remain available for download at the bean-osx.com website. It may even be updated as necessary to keep the app running on future versions of OS X. Also, I'll try to continue technical support at the usual email address." Since this announcement, Hoover has provided further updates and fixes for Bean, reaching version number 3.4.7 by October 2022.


Features

The design of Bean was heavily influenced by Marten Van De Kraats' article "Lean Word Processor Specifics". It is especially suitable for note taking or writing short articles because the program is highly responsive and starts almost instantly, while full-featured office suites take a much longer time to load. While Bean is not designed to compete with programs like LibreOffice Writer,
OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) an ...
, or Microsoft Word, its feature set is complete enough to cover the needs of many users. Starting with version 3, Bean has a completely new user interface with an emphasis on simplicity. Bean has the following features: * A 'Live Word' count * A 'Get Info' panel for 'In-Depth' statistics * A zoom-slider to easily change the view scale * An Inspector panel with many sliders * Date-stamped backups * Autosaving * A page layout mode * An alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue) * Selection of text by Text Style, Paragraph Style, Color, etc. * A floating windows option (like Stickies has) * Dictionary, word completion, etc. As of version 3: * Tabbed editing * Ability to resize the width of the draft edit view within its window It also includes full-screen mode, which only displays the text. The following features are deliberately missing: footnotes, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does support in-line graphics).


File formats

Bean natively reads and writes these
file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...
s: * .rtf format (rich text) * .rtfd format (
Rich Text Format Directory Rich Text Format Directory, also known as RTFD (due to its extension ''.rtfd''), or Rich Text Format with Attachments, is a primary document format of TextEdit, an application native to NeXTSTEP and macOS which has also been ported to other ve ...
, rich text with graphics) * .bean format (identical to .rtfd) * .txt format (Unicode and legacy) * .html format (as source code) * .webarchive format (Apple's web archive format) Bean imports and exports these formats: * .doc format (MS Word '97, minus images, margins, and page size) * .docx format (
Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version a ...
, minus images and some formatting) * .odt format ( OpenDocument, minus images, margins, and page size) * .xml format ( Microsoft Word 2003 XML, minus images) Bean can export all of the above formats to these formats: * .html (web page format, minus images) * .pdf * .doc compatible (with images intact) * .rtf (
Rich Text Format ) As an example, the following RTF code would be rendered as follows: This is some bold text. Character encoding A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. Th ...
, with images intact)


See also

* List of word processors * Comparison of word processors * Office Open XML software * OpenDocument software


References


External links

*
2007 review at Low End Mac2009 interview with James Hoover, creator of Bean
{{Word processors MacOS word processors MacOS-only software Word processors