There are a lot of different kinds of software around these days for publishing information on paper. Which kind should be used for which project? More to the point, how does one evaluate whether Microsoft Word is adequate for a particular project, or whether something more capable is indicated? The graphic on this page is based on discussion I found in the comp.text FAQ from Usenet.
Word processors are primarily designed to help clerical people handle business correspondence, and for use in general print authorship, as in books and magazines. Features intended to make things easier for non-technical people tend to begin to get in the way when projects become longer, more technical, or very much more complex.
Desktop publishing (DTP) began with programs like Adobe PageMaker and Ventura Publisher. The original idea was to free advertising layout from high-cost traditional publishing methods; to put ad-agency-style publishing literally on a user's desktop.
Translating large mainframe databases into large reference documents with simple formatting is an activity that has been going on for a long time (example: phone book gray pages). This is the typical realm of what the FAQ file authors call host-based formatters such as troff, TeX, and Scribe.
Organizations that must face both the very large size and very complex formatting issues apparently must bite the bullet and pay some big bucks. The implication from the FAQ file, as I read it, is that they used to pay through the nose for traditional publishing methods, and now such things are done by expensive in-house proprietary software development.
The center area of the graph, described as technical publishing, is an area of more recent development. This is the regime in which sophisticated technical products need to be rigorously documented, at lengths up to a few hundred pages. It typically involves generated tables of contents and indexing, line graphics, screen shots, automatic cross references, and yards of tables. This sort of thing is a lot more pleasant to do in FrameMaker than in Word ... trust me, I know.
If this is the class of problem you need to solve, then I think it's going to be pretty hard to beat FrameMaker, now known as Adobe FrameMaker. In my opinion, FrameMaker is the power tool for technical documentation. It's been widely adopted among large high-tech organizations, and my experience with it impressed me mightily with its extreme stability. Let me say that again another way: FrameMaker always does exactly what you expect it to do. You very quickly become secure enough to do things like unconditional global search-and-replace on paragraph or character formats, on very large documents, with confidence. This reliability tends to improve your productivity as well as your frame of mind. It used to be admirably cross-platform (Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac) but only Solaris and Windows are supported now (third quarter 2004).
I guess the main virtue of Microsoft Word is obviously that darn near everybody has it. That's why people call Microsoft "The Seattle Steamroller." Certainly among corporate users it's very ubiquitous. If you're trying to make a document with tables, headers, cross-references and other complex formatting, and have a maximum number of users able to open it, Word is an obvious option. Whenever maximizing access is an issue, there's always going to be pressure to use Word format whether it's adequate for the material or not. Microsoft even has free viewers for Word and Excel available for download. But Word is buggy (I can give personal testimony involving multiple versions) the interface is inconsistent and confusing, and it's just plain aggravating to work with.
There's also the problem of Word macro viruses. As early as 1997 there were over a thousand known macro viruses, almost all of them Word-based. See my PC maintenance pages for more detail about antivirus precautions. You can avoid transmitting macro viruses by distributing RTF format ("Rich Text Format") instead of native Word DOC format.
Word is especially annoying after you've had a taste of FrameMaker. I hate to think how many people there must be out there who think that the way Word behaves is as good as things ever get.
Also available is Writer, the word processor that's part of OpenOffice.org, the open-source freeware alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice.org can open and save files in the MS Office document formats, and this includes Writer and Word's DOC format. Writer has nice spell check and word count tools; you can select part of a document and it will give you separate word counts for your selection and the whole document. Another nice feature of Writer is that it supports regular expression searches. OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released in October 2005.
Writer 2.0 has sophisticated styles features. Styles in word processing let you apply a name to a collection of formats, and apply them all as a set in one step. You can also edit the style definition later and have those format changes applied to all elements formatted with that style.
| styles type | MS Word 2003 | FrameMaker | OOo Writer 2.0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| paragraph | X | X | X |
| character | X | X | X |
| table | X | -- | -- |
| frame | -- | -- | X |
| page | -- | -- | X |
| list | X | -- | X |
Page styles in Writer have a role similar to section breaks in Word.
In fairness I have to say I have personally seen FrameMaker handle huge complex cross-referenced technical documents with flying colors, and I can't say that about Writer yet. Sure would be nice to find out though.
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