Re: Word processors for Mac - the verdict

In article
<1ii1g5i.l9313u1vq4lfaN%real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell) wrote:

Chris Ridd <chrisridd@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Justin C <justin.0805@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

For me, the two tasks that all modern WP programs bundle are best
handled as seperate jobs. Get the words composed, sort the layout
afterwards. If I try doing both at the same time thoughts about layout,
paragraphs hanging, widows/orphans, and all that, distract me from
making the content the best I can.

But then you often still need to refine your text to make the layout
actually work better though, don't you? (Trimming a few words to lose
an unfortunate page break, that sort of thing.)

With a proper layout tool, you shouldn't need to do that very often at
all. I know I don't.

TeX has the power to enable you to deal with troublesome page breaks
without re-writing the text. Current LaTeX makes it relatively easy to
do so - especially with a rather in need of re-writing package I put
together (called rmpage - needs re-writing, don't get it from CTAN).

Thats why I, like Peter, miss WordPerfect... I've still got the keyboard
overlay for when/if I can ever get it working again! Mind you, TextMate
then copy paste into Pages sorts me out these days.

I never liked WordPerfect. The whole idea of the content being a stream
of serially parsed codes seemed quite wrong, compared to a model where
objects like paragraphs and characters have formatting properties.

The idea that `formatting properties' can be applied to paragraphs and
characters sounded attractive to me until I tried using it with MS Word
and found that:

1) The formatting never worked properly - /never/.

Yes it does - particularly if you use styles. Of course, if people use
Word as a fucking typewriter, it will - and does - look like ***.

2) It was nearly impossible to find out what `properties' were being
applied to what.

No it isn't. It's trivial.

Total disaster as far as I'm concerned - although it looked neat in the
manual.

Because it's hard to find out what's being considered as `an object for
the purposes of this bit of formatting' in MS Word in particular, and
what formatting is being applied in any case, I have to say that MS
Word's approach to this sort of thing is the pits.

The implementation of the `formatting by object' concept in all wysiwyg
WPs I've tried to use has been very poor and impossible to use
intelligently.

No, you have problems, because, as we've discussed, you are unable to
"get it" by exploring and fiddling around. When we had our first
discussion about this you assumed I must have been on courses to learn
Word, and became quite rude when I assured you I hadn't, and,
additionally, hadn't had much trouble in learning how to use Word's
basic formatting.

Word can be very irritating sometimes. Writing a new paper as I am, I
spent some time yesterday remembering to turn the *** auto-correct
off, which was more trouble than it's worth.

But, I would suggest people use what they feel comfortable and most
productive with. There's unlikely to be one "right" solution.
.