Then Ventura decided to Windows-ize the program. You probably
remember this. Without wasting too many words on the subject,
they basically broke it beyond recognition. I remember throwing
my hands up in despair; the new version sucked so badly that it
was unusable.

That's odd, because I never had problems with the 4.x versions.


Anyhow, to make a long story less long, this began my search
for another tool to write my manuals with. We briefly toyed with
PageMaker: another utter failure. Sure, you could coax a long
document out of it, but it was a pain in the ass.

PageMaker is ideal for producing highly irregular (unstructured) documents,
of any length. It is not a good choice for "structured" documents that need
TOCs, cross-references, etc. For that purpose, it's pretty much without
equal and very easy to learn and use. It's a shame it's no longer in print.
I consider it a classic piece of software -- like the House of Peers, it
doesn't do very much, but it does it very well.


Because of my antipathy to all things Micro$oft, it hadn't even occurred
to me to try Word, and I had simply assumed that it wouldn't cut the
mustard. I don't remember how I ended up using it; probably total
frustration at every other available publishing program drove me to it.
In any case, after getting over my initial distaste for it, I discovered
that not only could it do everything I had done with Ventura, but it
could do many things better, and it could do a lot of things VP couldn't
do.

I don't know which version of Word you're talking about, but it's not any
I've ever seen. I know of nothing that Word can that VP cannot. At least,
not in earlier versions.

If I had to choose between the current version of Word (2007), which is an
excellent word processor (I especially like the ribbon), and v3 of Ventura,
running under GEM, to produce a complex document, I wouldn't have to think
for a microsecond as to which I'd use.


The latter category includes such things as text references, like "for
more information, see _______ on page X". With VP, I had to do these
by hand; I put in the text, replacing the page number with a certain
string, then when I got ready to print the manual, I'd go through the
document with a seach and replace, find the referenced page number
by hand, and type it in.

I don't know which version of VP you were using, but once you've entered the
page-number tag, Ventura completely automates computing and inserting the
cross references. IT ALWAYS HAS.


Before I go too far, I should acknowledge that Word does indeed have
many, many flaws. You talked about "unstable image placement"; how
about images disappearing entirely? For an extreme example, imagine
you have a 120-page document with hundreds of images in it, as mine
did. Then imagine opening your document to work on it and discovering
that each and every image had been replaced by a red frame with a big
red "X" through it!

In fairness, the 2007 version of Word no longer has unstable image
placement. But the ability to exactly position an image, and more
importantly, to control its spacing from the text, is one of VP's strong
points.

The problem with Word is that it was never intended to produce long, complex
documents, whereas VP was. Word's "enhancements" in this regard only make it
clunkier. As Word has made certain operations -- such as heading
numbering -- more and more automated, they have become increasingly
difficult to use. Worse, formatting can become corrupted in startling and
unbelievable ways that make it impossible to change the formatting without
moving the text to an empty document. This simply does not occur in VP.

The beauty of VP is that it /doesn't/ automate things that are easy to do by
hand -- such as specifying how you want a heading numbered.

If the PM for Word were someone who was actually a professional writer, Word
would quickly and drastically improve. I have no idea who the current PM is,
but whoever it is is an utter idiot.

One of the startling problems with Word, which has existed from at least the
first Windows version, and has never been corrected, is that the default
paragraph spacing is 0 points. This leads to ignorant users (ie, 99% of
users) putting double carriage returns between lines. The resulting
documents are usually a mess.


But I have to say that I came to respect Word's functionality for
creating long documents, including tables of contents, indexes, tables
and cross-references. Its use of "styles" for global formatting is
extremely powerful and sensible, and helps immensely in long document
creation. (Pity 99% of Word users have no idea how to use styles: ever
tried to "fix" a document where people changed fonts, boldface, etc.,
every other word or so, inserted tabs to format text, used dashes to
create tables?)

VP uses styles, too. Indeed, they are weirdly similar to XML tagging.

If I were teaching a class in Word, the first thing I'd teach (after showing
the students how to create, save, and open files) is Styles. If you don't
understand Styles, you have no idea how to use Word efficiently and
productively, nor will you be able to create good-looking, easily maintained
documents.

The one apparent advantage of Word in this regard is that one style can be
derived from another. So, for example, if Heading 2, 3, etc, are all derived
from Heading 1, then changing Heading 1's font will automatically change the
font of all the sub headings. As far as I know, VP doesn't work that way.


A very useful skill in using Word is knowing what doesn't work and
either staying away from it or working around it. I never had the
problems with automatic pagination you described (maybe you were using
an earlier version that me: I used 97 for a long time, now use 2000),
but there are lots of things that don't work as well as they should or
just plain don't work at all. But for the most part, its features work
well enough to make it an appropriate tool for long documents.

Unwanted background repagination/pagebreak has occurred in every version of
WinWord I've used, regardless of the computer or operating system, even when
I turn it off.


One thing I wanted to do but never could make work was master
documents and subdocuments, which would have been nice, as
my manuals were divided into chapters. I never did determine if this
facility even worked at all, and just gave up. It made for very large
(multi-megabyte) documents, but they were still manageable.

I've seen other people try to use it and wind up with a mess. Whether this
was their fault, of Word's fault (I suspect the latter), I don't know.


I'd summarize Word by saying it's an extremely powerful program
(you might not realize just how powerful it is until you start playing
with VB and macros) with a very badly-designed user interface that
is quite suitable for documents of any length.

For Word processing, I wouldn't use anything /but/ Word. But I would never,
ever use it for long documents. It's clumsy and frustrating beyond belief.
VP is simple.