Re: Word Processors: Outlines, Main Text and Footnotes

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 5166

Posted by cacx1999
2006-02-06 15:05:03

@ Alex D.: I don’t have hands-on experience with Word 2003 (only 97, 98 and 2000), but I used the document map for long documents with Version 97, 98 and 2000, and Word could *not* show the document map and the footnotes at the same time. And the document map was nothing more than a “navigator”, not an outliner. Did that change?
And back then, Word was notorious (in my own experience) for rearranging the document structure, changing levels of the outline and even of the pure basic text at will, renumbering the headers in crazy ways, wrong positioning of images and the like. Thie was especially annoying when trasferring document between machines (like, between a Mac with Word 98 and a PC with 97).
From what I’ve read, Word 2003 still can’t handle long documents containting tables, footnotes and pictures properly (e.g. I read a comparison in the well-respected German magazine “c’t” where Word 2003, WordPerfect and WordPro all failed miserably with long, complex documents, while StarOffice, Textmaker and Papyrus were much better). So I wonder if it makes sense to throw any cash at yet another version of Word.

@ Franz: I just downloaded Mellel and will give it a test drive on my b/w G3. But although I said OS doesn’t matter, I’d actually preferred something that runs on a PC (Windows/Linux/something), as I only have two broken OS X-capable and portable Macs (iBook, Pismo) while I have several working Wintel laptops (and a Powerbook 3400c which I won’t dare to put OS X on).

(BTW, the formatting tools in the form for posts don’t seem to work in Opera.)

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