Also, the program Publicon by Wolfram Research that I have been using for mathematics-heavy documents (it is based on Mathematica) is not at all affected by Leopard it too uses the old Carbon routines. These are the routines that Adobe uses in its applications. It is clear that Leopard has not made very many changes in the QuickDraw/Carbon routines that were used by most of the early ports from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, most likely because these have been deprecated-use of them makes the porting of applications from the PowerPC to the Intel architecture much more difficult than clicking a switch in the Xcode development system. As I understand it, Word's text engine makes low-level calls to the QuickDraw text routines to actually draw the text, but it is the private text engine that does the layout for screen and print imaging.
The specifications for Word require that exactly the same text layout (line breaks, etc.) be produced from the same document on Macs and Windows, so it was necessary for Microsoft's Macintosh operation (the MacBU) to roll its own text engine. On the contrary, Word uses its own text/typography system. Because I just tested a big document (65 pages, no tables, bold and italic but all one font) and yes, it was a nightmare - as in unworkably slow - in NWP, even with iTunes turned off -but Word had no problem with input speed. I hate to say this - but the problem is not simply Apple text system being glacially slow on old machines running Leopard.
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