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Subject:To Word, or not to Word? From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Sat, 6 Mar 1999 05:03:27 -0700
Tracey Moore is <<...questioning the wisdom of using Word to do this
manual.>>
I like Word an awful lot now that I've had time to get over my
initial aversion to it, but I don't consider it an acceptable
substitute for proper technical publishing software. You can
accomplish wonderful things with it if you're lucky and skillful, and
many people do so without a moment's trouble, but so many other
people report horror stories that I have severe reservations about
recommending Word as a professional production tool. If the problems
I've read about at least had something in common, were predictable,
and were readily solvable, I'd bite my tongue and say that Word makes
the grade, but Word problems tend to be random, incomprehensible, and
devilishly hard to fix... as you've just discovered.
Framemaker is probably your best bet by far; I say this not from
personal experience (we cheaped out and bought Word, over my
protests), but rather based on five years of monitoring tool
discussions on techwr-l. Frame has its quirks, but it's rock steady
and makes Word look like what it is: a DTP wannabe.
