Papyrus gets 5 stars from me because it does two things no other word processor does for me, and both things meet my needs.

[1] It's the first powerful word processor that produces editable output fully compatible with my DEVONthink Pro databases. Not only is the text of those Papyrus documents fully searchable and analyzable, the layout including footnotes, endnotes, images, spreadsheet tables, etc. is viewed in my databases exactly as in Papyrus. And that includes working hyperlinks for URLs, mail addresses and internal 'bookmark' hyperlinks.

From my DEVONthink Pro database I can select such a document, click a button to open it under Papyrus, then edit and save it. The changes are then visible in my database next time I look at the document. And I'm looking at the actual document including images, footnotes, full layout, everything.

I can't do that with Word, Mellel, Pages or any other word processor above the level of TextEdit.

That's because Papyrus 12 for Mac OS X can produce editable PDFs. Fully, absolutely, completely editable PDFs saved with the "pap.pdf" suffix. That's a WOW! feature, and the reason I bought Papyrus 12.

[2] I'm doing a project that results in lots of PDFs. Those files are reviewed by several people who often request changes. In the past, I've had to do the dreaded two-step. I've had to find and open the original document created under another application, edit and save it, then create a PDF version of the changed file. No more. Now I just open the PDF generated by Papyrus, make changes and save the file. That's it. No second step required, no duplication of material on the drive.

Perhaps you won't understand why I appreciate that one-step edit/save process until you are faced with managing dozens of PDFs that have a number of requests for changes.

Summary: For my needs Papyrus 12 is wonderful. For those who need to include powerful spreadsheet table elements within a document (which can read data from other files as well), it's very good. For those who need very large documents, with the capability of generating a linked table of contents, it works well. For those who might need complete compatibility with MS Word documents, it's not that great, but can capture the text of Word documents.

For those who need fully editable PDFs produced by a capable word processor, there's nothing like Papyrus.

The developers note that Papyrus may be able to open "normal" PDFs in the future. As I work with a lot of OCR'd PDFs, I hope that would let me correct OCR errors.