Tony Smith wrote:

>>> So what do all you authors use for (non-fiction writing) software?  I
>>> was contemplating doing some writing, and found microsoft word (which
>>> I assumed did everything) to be terribly lacking in things like
>>> including source code examples and such.  Short of $$$ packages like
>>> Framemaker, ...

>> I've also used Word for writing reports, which included figures and
>> images.  In my opinion, it is lousy for desktop publishing.  

> Styles aren't a good thing, they are THE thing.  If you don't know styles,
> you don't know Word.  

I'm often amazed at how people who didn't figure out Word want to try their
luck with the publishing applications like Framemaker, Quark etc.  If you
don't want to spend the time to figure out how to make Word behave and do
what you want, you probably won't have much luck with these more complex
packages either. Of course they can do things that Word can't, but most of
the complaints are not about things that Word can't do, they are about
things that the person hasn't taken the time to learn how to do. I figure
that the time to learn how to do them with Quark is not less.

I don't do a lot of advertising or newsletter type publishing where complex
page layouts, text flowing through several arbitrarily placed frames or
professional color handling is important. But I write a lot of non-fiction
professional documents, and I have yet to find a formatting challenge that
couldn't be rather easily resolved with Word. If you want to make your life
easy, think a bit about how you want it to look, create the styles, and
work with them. 

Sometimes I rework a document created by someone else without using styles.
It's amazing how the visual consistency increases with a bit of thought and
structuring work. If you want people to read your stuff, /thinking/ about a
suitable presentation and actually designing it is not something that
should be neglected. (Yes, that's design work. You may be able to add a
whole new dimension to your documentation by looking at it that way.)

(That's of course not restricted to Microsoft Word. That's the same thing
with any presentation system.)


> Formatting a document should take less than 5% of your time.  Much less if
> you're in law or accounting.

Especially if you find yourself writing similarly formed documents
repeatedly. You can't know how styles makes this easier and the result
better until you've tried it.

Gerhard
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