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Mon, 21 Aug 2000 09:17:25 +0000
TEXT/PLAIN (43 lines)
I know this is a bit off-topic, but...

>1) All of my serious writing is done in FrameMaker. I have found Microsoft Word
>to be inadequate for: patents, papers, and grant proposals. At least in my
>hands, Word does not permit simple, reliable numbering of paragraphs. Word also
>does not properly protect the definitions of paragraph formats.

Rumour has it (or is it documented fact?) that Word was never 'designed' to be
anything more than a useful tool for writing letters and small pamphlets.
Unfortunately it appears to have been adopted by industry as a tool for
publication of documentation. What is even more unfortunate is that in the move
from Word 2.0 to Word 6.0:

a) document comparison got screwed up and has never been the same since. It used
to be in Word 2.0 that you could open a document, select Tools -> Compare
Documents and Word would happily sideline the changes that had been made. It
would *not*

1. Screw up any tables you've got by inserting a blank row for each changed or
deleted row.

2. Screw up you page formatting and so on.

b) paragraph numbering was significantly changed to make it easier to use
Heading styles for numbering. Unfortunately the implementation of this made it
*very* difficult to do any page numbering (even using Headings) reliably. Word
2.0 was functionally far superior and also had a 'learn' selection in the
numbering dialog that would continue numbering in the way you had started.

Furthermore, Word 6.0/95 used WordArt 2.0. In the move to Word 97, this was
dropped in favour of some other version of WordArt. The new version of WordArt,
while possibly an improvement in terms of ease of use etc, does not have some of
the facilities WordArt 2.0 had. My particular gripe is that with WordArt 2.0,
when you added shadows to text you could infinitely adjust the lighting position
to achieve exactly the shape of shadow you wanted. Now the shape is fixed.

So there's progress for you!

Anyway - sorry about this being off-topic for the list, it's a Monday morning
and it hasn't been a good week-end :-)

John

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