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Sounds like you need a desktop publishing tool and not a word processor.
Consider Adobe FrameMaker, Corel Ventura, and Interleaf. I'm a big fan of
FrameMaker. I think you need to search the archives and research previous
discussions about this, because there have been some. For example, the
following address that I got from this list has a whitepaper on why use
FrameMaker: http://www.simplywritten.com/wpx.htm.
>>>These manuals were done in Quark, and Engineering (of which
>>>I am part)
>>>hates Quark. Personally, I'm not a fan of Quark for doing manuals
>>>because it's not very updateable (is that a word? I'm getting nutty
>>>here.)
>>>
I have a feeling that Engineering will hate anything that is not Microsoft
Word because Word is so intuitive and easy to use for word processing. Aside
from yourself, how many folks in engineering push the envelope with graphics
and long-doc creation? Word is what they are used to, it's what they have on
the PC at home, and anything else is an unnecessary learning curve for most
of them. Really, Word meets their needs. Therefore, expect a fight ;?).