Gerhard Fiedler wrote:

> Well, what you describe is not anymore about writing a common 
> paper. This is about book or newspaper publishing. While Word 
> can be coerced into doing much of that, it wasn't meant for 
> that. So yes, I guess I would use a publishing program for that, too. 

Lists of figures and tables, twosided pages, floats with mixed
graphics/tables and text in them, cross refferences, equations, headers and
footers, complex vectorial graphics with text and even equations in them,
ect. are the norm in my everyday work (teaching mathematics in engineering).
A whole of my books are written the way I mentioned. Even with ligatures.

> But the start of the thread was not about publishing a 
> newspaper. I don't think that the papers that most produce in 
> their everyday activities require these complexities. And 
> even if they do, it is probably still the question whether 
> you necessarily should /write/ the paper using a professional 
> publishing program -- or whether it's not more convenient to 
> use the publishing program only for publishing. (How many 
> journalists use their newspaper's publishing system to write 
> their articles? Probably not
> many.) I at least don't care much about ligatures when I'm writing. 

I Agree. Ligatures are only an example.

Newspapers are, of course, another thing. I missed the original message of
this thread, so I don't know for sure if the OP wants to write a book or a
newspaper. I inferred it from the thread title: "...Ideas for books on PIC".
By the way, aren't we getting way too far from the original question?  :o)

Anyway, sorry for being so controversial. I thought I had the chance of
sharing my experience with Word in the fields of the thread: I am really
persistent using Word, it is my everyday tool for text editing. Even with
some complex tasks. But I have to migrate to LaTeX (or SGML) sometimes,
because Word is not to the task. It can be done in Word, but It need too
much work to do some tasks that are much effortless in other systems.

It seems to me that selecting between word processing or specifical editing
tools have a great amount of 'religion' faith. Don't know a better way to
say it in English.


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