Personally, I see no reason why a mailing list about a particular program should be operated by the manufacturer. In fact, there are excellent reasons why such a list should be operated by a person whose interest is neither financial nor occupational, and should allow for the free exchange of opinions and ideas. 1- The existence of a "free-for-all" list does not prevent the software manufacturer from having its own mailing list(s) or newsletter(s) which can present things from the company's point of view. (See those friendly Nisus newsletters calling our attention to the month's specials, etc.) 2- No program is perfect so there needs to be a place where its users can report bugs and work-arounds, complain about the lack of certain features and suggest utility programs to fill the gaps, express frustration as well as satisfaction, etc. without some corporate moderator stepping in to keep negative messages from appearing on the list. 3- Something special happens on unmoderated mailing lists which is quite different from what happens on the strictly-moderated, always-on-topic kind. The latter are good for keeping one's e-mail volume under control and picking up useful snippets of information. The former, however, take on a life of their own and become real communities (as opposed to the phony ones some Web portals try to create) where people know that if they have a problem, whether with that specific program or with something only peripherally related, half-a-dozen people are ready and willing to spend time trying to help. (The Nisus gang are very helpful but I wouldn't expect them to know everything about the Mac world and I know that at least one fellow-subscriber will have the answer to any given question.) Actually, it would be sensible of me to give up this list since I can't use NE and can't get past NW 4.1.6 due to the limitations of my equipment; one could argue that I should be unsubscribing and spending the time I spend reading and writing here on paying work or getting enough sleep. In practice, though, I learn a lot about all sorts of things (like later versions of the OS and software that runs on them, clever ways of getting around problems with macros I could never write myself, etc.) and it seems some of my knowledge can be useful to other subscribers. And of course I also enjoy the cameraderie... so here I am. If some of the issues discussed don't interest me particularly and people occasionally go beyond the bounds of politeness, well, that's life; I just tune that stuff out -- and I'm sure there are those who simply skip past my wordy postings which don't interest them. Now, to return to Ben's points: Yes, from the sound of it, Ben, you might well find that a true layout program does a much better job of handling your graphics and captions -- that's exactly the sort of thing such programs are really designed to do. Using either BBEdit or NW to prepare the non-graphic aspect (that is, most of the content) is a breeze given the powerful functions and macros -- better than the usual wordprocessors and much less likely to distract you from noticing errors because they are formatted so nicely, which is a real problem for people editing (or self-editing) whether on-screen or on paper. [If I had a nickel for every manual I've seen where nobody noticed that the words in those nifty sidebars and captions were full of mistakes, I would surely own an iBook by now!] On the other hand, we can always hope that NW 6 (or 6.01) will resolve your text-wrapping problems and handle tables adequately for your purpose -- in which case I would STILL recommend you nail down your content in plain format first, then go through the text applying styles, and save the graphics-embedding and text-flowing for the last step before printing a proof. A fellow-editor has been giving an extremely popular seminar for editors for some years; it's called "Eight-Step Editing" and recommends (oddly enough) EIGHT passes through a manuscript after the writer's final draft, on each of which you check for specific types of problems -- in effect, codifying what most of us editors learned by hard experience, that it's simply impossible to stay focused on spelling, grammar, captions, heading-level formats, page-breaks and everything else all at once. The psychologists tell us the human short-term memory can handle 7-10 discrete items in a list; a careful edit of a book requires that one check about 100 items for accuracy and consistency throughout the manuscript! No software can do it all for you but NW is pretty darned good at most of it and non-contiguous selection alone is worth its weight in gold. Regards, Judyth ###################################################### Judyth Mermelstein "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..." Montreal, QC <espresso@e-scape.net> ######################################################
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