🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13OCT199202420720@trentu.ca> bwolfe@trentu.ca (BEN WOLFE) writes:
>   Frustrated with PageMaker? Join the club! I OWN PageMaker 4.2a, and have
>   access to QuarkXPress through work. PageMaker sits compressed and idle on
>   my disk and I rarely do so much as look at it. I'd delete the damn thing
>   and forget it if it hadn't cost so much ...
>


I received 15 publications written in Word and WordPerfect, and told to
make a book out of it. No problem, I thought, LaTeX can handle this.

I was then told to use PageMaker or XPress, because the book had to be
editable by other people than me.

A quick glance at both programs told me that XPress comes closest to the
versatility and exactness that LaTeX offers. Not very close, but closest.

OK, now I have included a few chapters, I thought, let's make a table of
contents. Then it dawned on me.

From right out of the box, XPress can't do

	footnotes
	table of contents
	indexes
	bibliographies
	tables
	cross references

all  of which LaTeX does for free.

From a scientific book publishing point of view, both XPress and PageMaker
are toys. There's a lot of stuff you can do with both of them. PageMaker
can do table of contents and indexes, and is as such a usable toy.

OK, so for the same price as the original application worth of XTensions,
XPress can be talked into doing serious stuff. Except than no XTenstion
makes XPress handle footnotes.

How do people dodge these problems? What are their secrets?

I'd rather have XPress with XTensions than PageMaker with Additions,
however, regardless of the price: can anybody out there name the street
price of XPress and the fax # of an American software pusher that deals in
XPress?


--
       Rolf Lindgren           |       "The opinions expressed above are
       616 Bjerke Studentheim  |        not necessarily those of anyone"
       N-0589 OSLO 5           |           rolf.lindgren@usit.uio.no