margo said:
Am involved in producing 800 page manual, 14 chapters. I
don't know which product would be more advantageous to the
task - Word 2003 or Publisher 2003? Suggestions?
It's a big over-simplification, but there are two kinds of desktop
publishing apps. One is great for layout - advertisements, greetings cards,
magazines (classic examples: Quark, InDesign). The other is good for long
documents - footnotes, indexes, cross-references, decent performance when
there are lots of pages and linked graphics (classic examples: Ventura,
Pagemaker).
Last time I looked, Publisher was firmly in the former camp. It lacks the
features you're likely to want for a manual. I'm not saying you couldn't do
it, just that it's unlikely to be the best tool for the job.
Word on the other hand *has* got all these features. However, its reputation
is not that great when it comes to long documents. Nightmare scenario is
when you are hard at work on pages 320 - 380 for several weeks. You backup
daily but your oldest backup is 4 weeks ago. Then you discover that pages
120 - 180 got hopelessly corrupted more than a month ago. I'm not saying
that would happen, just that it would worry me
If you use a document per chapter, you are more secure but have problems
with indexing. If you use the master document feature you run a big risk as
it's known to be buggy. Might be better in Word 2003 but in the absence of
clear information I'd assume not. There are some workarounds for this - see
the unofficial FAQ.
In summary, I might use Word, but more likely I'd turn to something like
Pagemaker which is designed for this kind of task. On a job this size, the
cost of getting the right app is modest compared to the cost of losing work
or constantly needing workarounds.
Tim
