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>Jane Bergen commented "that many writers do not understand the word
>"desktop publishing application"! Word is NOT a dtp application. "
>Woops - let's be careful with our language here. Word may not have
>been designed as a DTP tool, but it is certainly used as such.
Indeed. I did a 530-page manual in Word for Macintosh 5.1, including the
layout. It was a good-looking manual, too, with plenty of spiffy design
features. Later I did a 350-page manual in the same program, though it
wasn't quite as spiffy.
The only thing I really didn't care for was the lack of automatic
kerning, which made large text look rather uneven. Also, on the big
manual I had page headers which changed every two or three pages (and
furthermore, the first one was black while the rest were gray), so I had
to create lots of sections and use the first/even/odd header features in
ways Microsoft never intended them to be used. This was a pain, and
could no doubt have been alleviated by using something higher-powered
such as FrameMaker (or better yet, letting the art department do the
layout) -- but I was on a mission to prove it could be done for some
reason.
No, Word is not really a DTP program, but it plays one sometimes.
--
Jerry Kindall (kindall -at- manual -dot- com)
Manual Labor: We Wrote The Book! http://www.manual.com/
