CompuServe Messages

It's TeX. WP tries to be somewhat WYSIWYG, TeX makes no bones about being a "control language". As such, there are relationships to learn, in many ways it's similar to learning a programming language. That makes it much harder. But it is a fabulous tool – much better than WP, if you can handle the effort. I virtually ignored TeX for literally _years_ because I'd seen a "source" file and *knew* it was going to be a serious learning experience… I just didn't feel I had the time. If you get a chance, take a look at the Imagemaster manuals. That's TeX output. I made a very bad mistake, not going for TeX right up front. I wasted an enormous amount of time waiting for ProPage and PageStream to waddle thru WYSISYG data, and the end result wasn't what I wanted, *ever*. WP came the closest for handling TOC and index and so on, but it's an awful bear to use (indexing for instance is enough to drive you to drink, if you're serious, IE several hundred to a thousand entries). It took me about two weeks to "get into" TeX and LaTeX, and I see no current reason to turn away from it for serious (long) documents like manuals and so on. I still use PageStream for one and two page docs; both PageStream and TeX are very useful for generating Faxes. I'm getting the hang of some auto-generation in TeX for cover sheets and so on, unattended. I really like it. Ben