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: 5187

Posted by cacx1999
2006-02-07 18:26:00

Stephen,

can you tell me since which version Word is dependable with long documents? I’ve been thinking for a while now about buying a copy of Office 2002/XP because there were some improvements (to be more precise: multiple selection in Word and virtual folders in Outlook, although I’m not sure whether the latter isn’t a flawed concept overall). And I never really dared to test v2000 with really long documents (100s of pages); I had FrameMaker for that, professionally, and no need for this kind of documents, personally. Now I need them, personally. I definitely don’t want v2003 for some reasons that are OT to discuss here, but 2002/XP would be a possibility (and I have v. X for the Mac, I almost forgot that one, because I never use it; the only Mac OS X I use at the moment acts as some kind of server).

One of my major gripes with Word, however, is that its file format seems to have a very strange “container” model where you keep not knowing where exactly you’re placing your foot in at the moment. So it keeps changing formattings, hierarchy levels and the like for no apparent reason. You can’t always rely on styles when you need to edit something. There are always strange things happening. And since the file format hasn’t changed for a long time (save for MS’s obscure implementation of XML in some of the latest versions), I doubt that things might have improved.

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