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I have in the past argued with some Adobe execs about this exact issue:
that they were missing an enormous potential market by not releasing a
cut-down version of Frame at a cheap price. By holding to an
ever-increasing price for the product it has been far too much
restricted to a relatively few people, with others never learning to use
it at all.
Thus, they abandoned too much of the market to Word. This discussion was
many years ago now, before Word had begun to be so entrenched in many
organizations for technical documentation, for which I believe it is a
relatively poor fit IMHO. (It would be far better if they'd finally fix
so many places that have been broken version after version, such as
their rather pathetic autonumbering and master document "features"...)
I have long been of the opinion that it is entirely too bad that some
innovative organization has not created a really good style file for the
Lyx document processor for tech docs. Using it for things that have such
a style file is a real pleasure--it makes many of the tasks we confront
every day trivial, and far less training is required to learn to use it
than Frame or to learn the various necessary work-arounds for Word. Its
output in .pdf or print is nonpareil.
For example, someone just today was mentioning the problems of having to
recreate numbering for paragraphs received by multiple authors. That
would be a complete no-brainer in Lyx. What's more, you can move entire
sections to other places in a document and all relevant numbering
instantly changes (including any footnotes, if you have them).
Should any of you have to do any academic writing, you really should
take a look: www.lyx.org
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Choose your authoring formats and get any output you may need. Try
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