WordPerfect vs, MS Word (was: Re: [Ti] Re: OpenOffice on Mac)

[Ardeshir Mehta]

On 4-Dec-05, at 12:02 PM, Chris Olson wrote:

> On Dec 4, 2005, at 7:03 AM, William Scammell wrote:
>
>> I find PM is better for large books, while I prefer Quirk for  
>> short docs or adverts. (I haven't had enough time to really start  
>> digging into InDesign. Bad designer, No biscuit!!!)
>
> Our technical writers still use FrameMaker on PowerMac G3's running  
> OS 9  for large heavily formatted technical documentation/layout.   
> We looked at InDesign on OS X as a replacement for FrameMaker.   
> However, InDesign CS2 is still more ideally suited to short  
> documents and our trial runs with it failed.
>
> Our PowerMac G3/266's are almost 9 years old and are due for  
> replacement.  Adobe's failure to port FrameMaker to OS X, and  
> Apple's roadmap with lack of Classic support on the x86 Macs, was  
> the final nail in the coffin for our technical documentation  
> people.  They'll be going to Windows in Q1 2006 so we can get  
> support for our software.

Yes, you're right on all counts.

Afaik - according to David K. Every of MacKiDo - FrameMaker was an  
excellent program for long documents. (Never used it personally,  
though, but always lusted after it.)

But isn't MS Word at present up to the mark for most large heavily  
formatted technical documentation/layout? I did a book on Gödel's  
Theorem with MS Word 98 under OS 9, and it had all the  
metamathematical symbols etc. in it (I quoted almost the entire text  
of Gödel's original paper in it).

You can see it at:

<http://homepage.mac.com/ardeshir/Critique_Of_Goedel.pdf>

... and MS Word was adequate for the purpose. (Though I had to save  
everything as an .rtf file - if I saved it in Word format my iMac  
would unexpectedly crash.)