🚀 go-pugleaf

brianj@bedrock.cs.umd.edu (Brian Johnson) writes:

>I'd like to hear some opinions about word processors for large
>projects (my dissertation).

>I have a Macintosh at home and at school, as well as access to UNIX.
>I prefer not to use latex.

>Latex		Nasty for images.

>MacWrite	No support for multi-piece projects.

>Microsoft Word	Minimal support for multi-piece projects
>		ok references with WordRef
>		good tables, list generation
>		good for figures

>WordPerfect	Nice, clean looking interface
>		multi-piece projects with publish and subscribe?
>		table and list generation
>		automatic figure numbering and cross references
>		support for bibliographic references???

>I have not tried any others

>Is Nisus the way to go?  I am still a poor grad student working on his
>dissertation so money is a factor, but so is time.  I wnat to
>concentrate on writing - not tables, figure numbering, citations, etc.

>Thanks for any feedback.  Any pleasant dissertation writing tales out
>there?

Here's an unpleasant dissertation writing tale.  MS Word sucks for
doing a dissertation.  Maybe 5.1 is better, but I found a half-dozen
confirmed bugs in 5.0 that stopped me cold.  I ain't stupid, but for
that and many other reasons, I averaged about 2 calls/week to MS tech
support over the course of about 8 months.  

Why all this trouble?  First, as with every complex system, Word has
many ways to do things.  Therefore, when doing a document as large and
complex as a dissertation, if you don't have prior experience with the
application, you are going to organize things the wrong way sometimes,
and have to reorganize them, possibly several times.  Second, as a
technical person, I tried to actually use many of Word's more advanced
features.  But certain features, like OLE and publish/subscribe, were
meant to have limited use, so that slow speed and fixing Word's
screwups would not be problems.  Not true if you use them extensively.
There are many other reasons to list, but it's not worth the time and
effort.

I am currently learning Framemaker, which I would not originally
consider, due to its cost.  But the time I lost by working on Word's
screwups would have paid that cost many times over in lost wages
(since I didn't start working till I defended the dissertation).

My advice: Check out framemaker. Biggest benefit: Cross-platform
compatibility (except Mac figures, but you can use Framemaker's figure
editor to work around that).


--Ed