At 16:07 +0200 30/5/07, Mark Lawrence wrote: >I think I missed Shmuel's point as he was overtly discussing 'Print >Preview' and I think my need is somewhat different, so please allow me >to state it in more detail: what I tend to notice in Word is the poor >consistency of the texture of justified text. The 'rivers' (rivers = >gaps between the words in paragraphs) are never as well adjusted in Word >as you'd find in a professionally published document. It sounds >terribly pernickety I know, but I would migrate from Word for this >reason alone.
Word does not do typography, it just slams words onto the page. If you want beautifully laid-out text, you should be looking at InDesign, which contains a multi-line composer and can do smart tricks like optical kerning and overhanging punctuation. >Perhaps I should have drawn attention to this specific requirement to >begin with: I've just assumed that FM produces better layout. Almost anything produces better layout than Word. You can easily do a side-by-side test of the same text in Word and FrameMaker. Be sure to pay attention to hyphenation settings. Neither application can either detect or eliminate rivers: you have to do that manually. >I would be very interested in experiences that confirm this or are to the >contrary, just as I'm shamelessly interested in the extent to which FM has >broadened people's horizons career-wise. For me, Frame is mission-critical: no more, no less. I don't know about broadening horizons, but if I'd been forced to use Word for everything these past fifteen years, I'd have given up tech authoring long ago. -- Steve