🚀 go-pugleaf

>Currently work is being done solely using PC MSWORD (sometimes a
>little help from Ventura)

my sympathies.

>Pictures and drawings are artist produced and physically (scissors and
>tape) patched into the document.

Tape? I prefer wax, myself (stop kibbitzing, chuq....)

>I am soliciting for suggestions on the BEST (oh-boy, here it comes)
>packages in word processing, pagelayout, draw program and
>monitor(paperwhite or color).

>Important wordprocessing features to us are Revision Marks, style
>sheets and real WYSIWYG.

Hmm. Is everyone ready for a religious war? Hee-hee.

First, here's what I use for my DTP work:

	o Microsoft Word (used to be release 3.01, currently working with
	  4.0beta)
	o Ready, Set, Go! 4.0a (4.5 under evaluation. So far, so so)
	o Aldus Freehand 2.0 (neat stuff!)

The reason I've been using RSG instead of Pagemaker is that, prior to PM
3.0, it wasn't really that useful with long, text oriented documents. Aldus
has removed that restriction as of 3.0. I've also been having problems
converting to RSG4.5, so I'm not yet willing to recommend RSG. Looking at 
RSG4.5 and PM3.0, I'm not convinced that RSG is the better deal these days,
anyway. (Ask me again in a month when I've worked with RSG some more). I
don't have enough experience with other packages to discuss them rationally.

Word processors: hyper-religious. I use Word because it lets me get my work
done. FullWrite Professional will handle a lot of the stuff you want (it's
the only thing with change bars on the market right now) but it has
performance problems. I used it exclusively for a number of months, but
switched back to Word -- and in a semi-controlled productivity test I did on
myself, tripled my throughput. WriteNow's probably your third possibility (I
don't go near wordperfect), but if you're using Word on the PC, Word on the
Mac will be familiar -- and better. (come to think of it, an advantage of
PM3.0 is you can also get PM for the PC, so you don't obsolete all that
hardware right away....)

Drawing programs: Freehand meets Illustrator. Freehand has much stronger
text manipulations, especially FH2.0. Illustrator is somewhat stronger in
graphic manipulations. Depends on what you need. Lots of graphic designers
have both and switch back and forth depending on the job. I really like
Freehand. I like Illustrator, too, but I don't need it. Yet. 


Chuq Von Rospach	Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms		chuq@sun.COM
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