IBM Lotus Symphony BETA - Free

Posted by Graham Rhind
Oct 17, 2007 at 06:30 AM

At the risk of flogging this one to death, and just for the sake of completeness, my book does not contain multiple tables of contents, footnotes, multiple appendices, cross-referencing and so on. It does contain a table of contents but that is added at a later stage after conversion to pdf.

So those parts of the process are never a requirement - just the storing and manipulation of the text, tables and graphics. Word (and I’m talking about Word 2000 and its predecessor) has a clever way of opening large documents by opening only part of them and then opening other sections later as you scroll down. Other programs try to load the whole document in one go, which meant in my case I could have decorated my office whilst waiting.

And, as I mentioned, I don’t find Word aggravating and I do find it reliable. Naturally it won’t suit everybody, but what software does?

Graham

PS - I’m just starting my fourth book - in Word :-)

Chris Thompson wrote:
>Wow! I can’t imagine writing a 1100 page book in Word. For documents of that length, I’d
>encourage you to investigate tools specifically designed for that kind of job, such
>as LaTeX, FrameMaker, DocBook, or any of the variety of SGML tools. Not just for speed
>and usability reasons, but also because long documents tend to have advanced needs
>(e.g. multiple tables of contents, a main table of contents and then tables of
>contents by chapter, multiple appendices, heavy cross-referencing,
>cross-referencing between footnotes, etc.), and in my experience Word tends not to
>be reliable when using those features in combination, even for documents in the 30-50
>page range. Most of the long document-oriented tools tend to be bulletproof in
>comparison. There’s something to be said for consistently reliable, less
>aggravating tools.
> >—Chris
> >
>Graham Rhind wrote:
>>Absolutely. Before I moved
>it to Whizfolders my second book was in
>>a single Word document - 1100 pages. I admit
>that at that point Word was straining and
>>slowing significantly, which is why I cut
>into into chunks and put it into
>>Whizfolders. That Word file could not be opened in
>any other word processor I ever
>>tried - they fell over due to the size of the document.
> >