🚀 go-pugleaf

arie@eecs.umich.edu (Arie Covrigaru) writes:

>I used MS word for large manuscripts that included figures, tables,
>formulae and imported EPS. In putting a manuscript together I made
>use of Word's links, table generation, publish and subscribe (I
>subscribed to charts generated by MS Excel) and TOC (table of contents)
>generation. I was able to have all my text and graphics manipulated
>with Word's styles and made use of Word's integrated outlining
>features, which I find much improved in the latest versions of Word.
>I recommend MS Word for writing a dissertation on a Macintosh computer,
>unless it must be portable and editable in other platforms. I have
>seen dissertations written in MS Word in computer science and 
>mathematics and they looked as good as any other LaTeX processed 
>manuscripts.


I did all of these things as well, and I think my results stand up
well against Latex, too.  However, I still do not recommend that
anyone use Word for such a large, complex project unless they are
already familiar with its range of features, and are willing to work
around nasty bugs.  If you already know Word cold, fine.  But it's a
pain in the butt to learn.  Plus, I can tell you real, repeatable
horror stories about using links for cross references, where the links
became corrupted, or where editing the link source causes the link to
be broken.

Rest assured that I have informed MS tech support about these and
several other problems.  I hope they have remedied them in v. 5.1, or
they should burn in H*** as far as I'm concerned.

--Ed

PS Here's one of my pet peeves that cancels out one of Word's chief
advantages (outlining&renumbering).  Suppose you want to reference a
section by number, and you want the number to be updated when you
renumber the document after reorganizing it.  If you make a link to
the number, as defined in the appropriate heading, then when you
renumber the document, the link gets trashed when the old number is
deleted.

Anyone know if there's a better way to do this, and if its been fixed
in 5.1?