>>>If you haven't used a late version of Word, give it a try. It's a pretty snazzy desktop publishing tool.
>>
>>Is it, finally? I haven't been able to compose anything larger than a leaflet in it and still be able to control the layout as I could in Ventura (back in early nineties) or Quark (one attempt in 2003). Just about the worst experience was putting daughter's matricular work about the renaissance art, with just a dozen small pictures and no more than 20 pages - it was a thorough mess. Just adding a couple of sentences would cause the whole house of cards to collapse and I'd spend an hour putting all those little images where they should go. Whereas Ventura was quite capable of putting together a whole 32 pages newspaper, with flowing and reflowing columns back in 1990 on a 386. It would sweat the processor, crash when it ran out of memory, but it just plain got the job done, and I never missed a deadline.
>>
>>It used to be that M$ would get things about right by version 3. Word is now 25+ years old, and it's now a DTP tool? I'm impressed.
>
>It's come a long way.
>One of my hobbies is oil painting and I use GIMP a lot for manipulating photos of my paintings.
>However, when I want to use text and images together, I find Word simpler and more usable.
>I make my own Christmas cards.
>I used to use GIMP to merge the text and images but for the past two years I've used Word and it's more straightforward.

Thanks for proving my point. I guess some of the leaflets I made here and there are even more demanding than a card. That's about the extent of how much DTP I'd trust to Word :).

Not that Libre Office is much better in that regard, it seems to have copied lots of behavior from Word, so if I have a document with more than ten pictures, it sometimes moves them around somewhat (though not as disastrously as I remember Word did). But then it's been a while since the last time I had to do that. I write my documentation in a Wiki :). DTP is, well, for publishers. I'm just happy to not have to do that any more.