[Techie Question] - Word Processing Programs better than MS Word?

[domtyler]

I prefer Excel now, back then it was Word for some goddamreason!

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[simoncc]

Esp. For formatting very large documents with complicated structures? I'm having a bit of a headache with Word (2003) at the moment and wondered if there's anything out there that's better?

Any advice much appreciated!

Mel.

In my experience nobody reads very large documents past the first page or so, so don't worry about this too much. One of the disadvantages of the computer age is that too many people write too many large documents and insist on printing a copy off for everyone from the boss to the cleaner.

 

[mr Mag00]

my vote for open office!!

 

[Tim Bennet.]

I'm not sure why you've dismissed Adobe FrameMaker as it's designed exactly for your purpose. In the Wiki entry it also gives some alternatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framemaker

 

[Melvil]

I'm not sure why you've dismissed Adobe FrameMaker as it's designed exactly for your purpose. In the Wiki entry it also gives some alternatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framemaker

Didn't mean offence Tim - and reading the wiki entry it sounds pretty good, but ideally a program would need to be open-source as have no resources I can devote to buying programs...

 

[HJ]

Didn't mean offence Tim - and reading the wiki entry it sounds pretty good, but ideally a program would need to be open-source as have no resources I can devote to buying programs...

Adobe is expensive (especially if you have to pay for it your self), you best bet is LaTeX. I had a friend who used LaTeX for writing his PhD thesis as it was easier to do the corrections that way.

If you do have to use Word, is best to split the document into separate sub documents and create a master document to stitch them together, but it is a real pain.