PageMaker vs. Word?

Subject: PageMaker vs. Word?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:59:47 -0400


Lisa Dugger wonders: <<I downloaded the trial version of PageMaker last week.>>

FYI: PageMaker has been discontinued, which means it won't be upgraded or fixed if problems arise in the future (e.g., with Windows Longhorn--or whatever it's now called). I always enjoyed working with PM, but it had serious flaws. InDesign is much better, but (as the current discussion shows) it can't yet compete with Frame for long, complicated documents.

<<One of the things that my boss is very concerned with is having to renumber a bulleted list or outline if changes are made to a document.>>

Well, at least you can tell him not to worry much about renumbering bulleted lists. <g> But he's right to worry about the _numbered_ lists; PM doesn't support automatic list numbering and renumbering out of the box. I'm sure there's a plug-in somewhere that will do this for you, but now that I've moved to InDesign, I don't keep up on such things. Try Google!

<<So far I have not been able to find a way to make PageMaker automatically update the list or outline.>>

Note that your subject line used the Word "versus" instead of the word "and". For a kludgy "and" solution, you could always cut the lists out of PM, autonumber them in Word, then paste them back into PM. Not very elegant, but it should work with a little tweaking. On the whole, though, you might be better off doing your manuals in Word. About the only significant advantages PM offers over Word are its abilities to handle color and typography properly.

For a slightly more elegant solution, check the online help for PM's text on linking to external documents instead of inserting them in the PM file. This used to work well for graphics (i.e., if you updated the graphic outside PM, PM automatically inserted the revised graphic in place of the old one), and I believe this feature was also supposed to work with Word files. In theory, updates made to the Word file would then be reflected in the PM file; in practice, I've never tried this, so I don't know how reliably it would work.

I'm not sanguine about this as a long-term solution, but if you've got time to play around and debug this approach...

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Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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References:
PageMaker vs. Word: From: Lisa Dugger

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