🚀 go-pugleaf

Philip,

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by just considering
marketing material features lists and selective comments about the
tools. Since you say that you haven't used FM, then most of your
conclusions are highly speculative at the minimum.

You have to realize that FM is a page-layout tool that can also be
used as a writing tool. What that means is that you can take your Word
documents and then use FM to do the final publishing. You may be
satisfied with the quality of the final output from Word, but if you
want a more polished product, then you'll quickly feel the pain in the
Word environment. 

Since you like hearing personal experiences, I once had to do an 800
page book in Word due to a client's stubbornness - I know full well
the problems of maintaining cross-refs, indices, numbered lists,
graphics, page reflows, Master Documents, etc. The next version (2
volumes, closer to 1100 pages), I did in FM in less than one-eighth
the original time and this included setting up all templates, tags and
layouts from scratch.

If you're comfortable doing your job with a swiss-army knife approach
with your tools, then perhaps Word is best for your workflow and style
of working. I need reliable, robust and precise tools for my workflow,
so I use FM. I've looked at alternatives, but keep coming back to FM,
since nothing else (so far) works quite as well.