Sorry for reviving an old, dead thread, but I ran across something I'd like to respond to. In a thread entitled "Which Os is better among the Windows Vista", William Sommerwerck wrote, regarding Microsoft Word:
I'd like to challenge that by saying that Microsoft Word *can be* a quite usable desktop-publishing program, in fact a very powerful and flexible one.
That is not to say that it's not without major problems. But let me tell my story:
I worked for a company as a technical writer, producing user manuals among other things. Full-blown, long manuals. I started out using Ventura Publisher, the old GEM versions that you described above. It worked OK, and at the time was really the only thing available (for the PC, at any rate) that would even do the job I needed to do.
Then Ventura decided to Windows-ize the program. You probably remember this. Without wasting too many words on the subject, they basically broke it beyond recognition. I remember throwing my hands up in despair; the new version sucked so badly that it was unusable.
I have a minor claim to fame, in that the owner of the company I worked for was friends with Rick Altman, who you may remember as the Ventura "guru"; Rick published several books and software add-ons for VP. I was actually able to talk to the guy. I don't think he liked me very much, because I basically vented upon him my utter frustration with the abominable new version. He did agree with me on most of the complaints I had, but of course he was pretty powerless to do anything about it.
Anyhow, to make a long story less long, this began my search for another tool to write my manuals with. We briefly toyed with PageMaker: another utter failure. Sure, you could coax a long document out of it, but it was a pain in the ass. (Just one example: tables in PM are embedded objects, not native, so anytime you want to change anything in a table, you basically have to invoke a whole 'nother application, edit the table, save it, then re-embed it in the document. No thanks!)
Because of my antipathy to all things Micro$oft, it hadn't even occurred to me to try Word, and I had simply assumed that it wouldn't cut the mustard. I don't remember how I ended up using it; probably total frustration at every other available publishing program drove me to it. In any case, after getting over my initial distaste for it, I discovered that not only could it do everything I had done with Ventura, but it could do many things better, and it could do a lot of things VP couldn't do.
The latter category includes such things as text references, like "for more information, see _______ on page X". With VP, I had to do these by hand; I put in the text, replacing the page number with a certain string, then when I got ready to print the manual, I'd go through the document with a seach and replace, find the referenced page number by hand, and type it in.
Pain in the ass! With Word, I could insert a bookmark in the text. Then when it came time to print, I simply did the "update fields" command, and voila! instant page numbers.
Before I go too far, I should acknowledge that Word does indeed have many, many flaws. You talked about "unstable image placement"; how about images disappearing entirely? For an extreme example, imagine you have a
120-page document with hundreds of images in it, as mine did. Then imagine opening your document to work on it and discovering that each and every image had been replaced by a red frame with a big red "X" through it!This did happen to me, but it was with an older version of Word (pre-97, forget which one exactly) that also had bad problems handling EPS images, which I used extensively. But these problems were fixed in the next release.
Regarding your experiences with image placement, it's true that images can be a bitch to position correctly, and can move mysteriously. But it turns out that this behavior is correctable. The problem is that most people don't know how to correct it, and that the default, out-of-the-box settings can cause this kind of behavior.
Out of the box, Word is *not* ready for handling long documents. But it can be tamed. The first thing I do upon installing Word is to go through the option settings and, for the most part, disable all the automatic crap that causes so many problems. Things like autoformatting tables, bullets, etc.; automatic text substitution (although I do like a few things here, like turning "--" into real typographic em dashes, formatting fractions, a few other things). I certainly don't want Word turning things like "(O" into smiley faces, or inserting hyperlinks for URLs or email addresses. All this is settable through the Options dialog.
But I have to say that I came to respect Word's functionality for creating long documents, including tables of contents, indexes, tables and cross-references. Its use of "styles" for global formatting is extremely powerful and sensible, and helps immensely in long document creation. (Pity 99% of Word users have no idea how to use styles: ever tried to "fix" a document where people changed fonts, boldface, etc., every other word or so, inserted tabs to format text, used dashes to create tables?)
A very useful skill in using Word is knowing what doesn't work and either staying away from it or working around it. I never had the problems with automatic pagination you described (maybe you were using an earlier version that me: I used 97 for a long time, now use 2000), but there are lots of things that don't work as well as they should or just plain don't work at all. But for the most part, its features work well enough to make it an appropriate tool for long documents.
One thing I wanted to do but never could make work was master documents and subdocuments, which would have been nice, as my manuals were divided into chapters. I never did determine if this facility even worked at all, and just gave up. It made for very large (multi-megabyte) documents, but they were still manageable.
I'd summarize Word by saying it's an extremely powerful program (you might not realize just how powerful it is until you start playing with VB and macros) with a very badly-designed user interface that is quite suitable for documents of any length.