🚀 go-pugleaf

Philip, 

In addition to what Arnis says (#11), thoughts with which I completely agree, I would argue that the choice of tool has impact on efficiency even beyond any battling of "bugs" (incidentally, in order not to devalue the word I would prefer reserving "bug" for programming errors that cause the application to malfunction; to label functional deficiency or merely cumbersome solutions as "bugs" seems to be a linguistic short-cut that can only lead to misunderstanding).  

The impact I'm thinking about is the approach to text production. When working in Word, the user will be exposed to a plethora of possibilities, with little (true) guidance as to the best choice. It's usually very easy to do things in Word, so easy you're actually tempted to do them without really thinking about how. This is fine if you're writing a memo, based on a Microsoft template. If you're doing anything else, then the systemic use of overrides in Word will soon have you bend over backwards to fix things. This phenomenon becomes especially apparent when several authors are involved or when the document(s) need to be moved to other systems. 

We have a client who was delayed in moving to a SGML-based environment, which led to us having to translate then edit (and then fix!) several thousands of pages in Word. We have several other clients who have listened too closely to the song from Microsoft and chosen similar work-flows. 

The major difference between FM and Word from my point of view is that the former stimulates an ordered and structured approach to text production. Everything (almost) you can do to affect the document is accounted for and readily available (typically only in one place); further the documents are close to self-sufficient.  

In Word, on the other hand, there are more ways to do things, closer interaction with other programs and less transparency ("ordinary" users shouldn't have to bother with the intricate detail). Trouble is, even when you don't know you're making a decision, you are, and in Word you're doing it all the time. Thus, you may not realize that the formatting of numbered lists is dependent on the "Normal" template of the local Office installation. You may not realize that inserting images in a document defaults to copying the image as a Word image into the document (rather than linking it) causing the document to grow exponentially (precipitating crashes), not to mention resulting in an image which is low quality and impossible to extract from the document.  You may not realize that if you reset paragraph formats and reapply them throughout the document, you will have to go through the document manually to fix all numbered lists because the will be sequentially numbered from start to finish (instead of ten separate 1-2-3's you will have 1 through 30). You may not realize that if you use style references, the document may not display correctly on a localized Word. Never mind everything else that might change if you open the document on another system. Etc, etc, etc. I could go on and on about nifty solutions in Word, that if improperly used can reek havoc at a later stage. 

Therefore, in my opinion, the treshold to producing a high-end document in Word (if at all advisable) is much higher than in FM. In other words, to do it right in Word when it comes to long documents (so you don't have to fix things at a later stage), you have to have a seriously thourough understanding of how Word works. 

To sum up, if you want to do either of the following, don't use Word:  
*  Have the document translated 
*  Produce more than 50 pages of text with any demands at all on the  page layout   
*  Send the document to other people for editing with preserved formatting 
*  Be constantly but unobtrusively reminded of the benefits of a well-structured document 
*  Have exact control over the page layout 
*  Work with multi-chapter books.

There are of course benefits with using Word as well. As with all tools, it is vital to use the right one for the right task; returning to Arnis, I must congratulate him on a very adept metaphore: MS Word -- the Swiss Army knife of publishing. 

/Fred