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Subject:Re: Which DTP do you use From:Win Day <winday -at- IDIRECT -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 6 Dec 1996 11:27:09 -0500
At 08:12 AM 12/6/96 -0600, Robert & Betty Gravlin <rbg -at- tetranet -dot- net> wrote:
>I have to agree with Christie Christopherson. WordPerfect is no harder
>to learn than MS Word. The big difference is that the Master Document
>feature in WordPerfect works much better, which makes it easier to
>create a table of contents and index. I think the sweat was well worth
>it. MS Word is buggy and too dependent on the mouse, which makes my
>mouse hand very tired after a long day of formatting a doc. I hate
>having to format each paragraph separately in Word. In WordPerfect,
>it obeys the format code until I turn off the format code. I can see
>what I'm doing because I have Reveal Codes, unlike Word.
I wish folks wold just admit the preference is personal, and stop
perpetuating myths about any particular software package.
I had serious crashes, more often and more catastrophically, with WP's
master doc feature than I ever do using Word's RD fields.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts for Word, or create your own, and you'll rarely
use the mouse.
Why do you have to format every paragraph separately? Use styles. If every
paragraph in your document looks different, you have serious document design
problems, not problems with the wordprocessing software.
But the Reveal Codes are not the ultimate answer, either. They can get just
as screwed up as Word's paragraph-based formatting, and are a lot harder to
correct.
>I use PageMaker only for short docs like a newsletter. It was hard to
>learn, but it is a necessary product with some projects. WordPerfect is
>industrial strength; Word is not.
I produce large (>1000 pages), complex (thousands of equations, graphics,
tables, figures, crossreferences, and index entries), highly technical
documents using Word. I encouraged my major client to switch from WP to
Word, and we're all a lot more productive now. Word is just as
industrial-strength as WP is.
It's all a matter of what you get used to and your personal preferences, not
a matter of enormous differences in capabilities.
Win
--------------
Win Day
Technical Writer/Editor
Email: winday -at- idirect -dot- com
