[DM-MUG] Last Night's Meeting: One more thing

[John Kisner]

Someone asked me this morning about choosing between Nisus and  
Pages.  I think I'll answer as an addendum to my little talk last night.

I could tell the group was losing interest towards the end, so I  
didn't really drive home the main point: Pages can probably do  
everything most people need in terms of both word processing AND page  
layout.  Ten years ago, you needed Quark or Pagemaker for the layout  
once you completed the "processing" of words.  I suspect you'd have  
trouble using Pages when working with print shops (I"m not sure if it  
does color separations and what-not), but it's really an amazing  
combination of power and ease of use that produces great PDF and  
printouts on your home printer.

When preparing for the talk, I found that most of the word processing  
programs did the same things, but I was often needing to search  
"help" (never seemed to yield an answer) and pdf manuals to find out  
how you actually did certain things (widow/orphan control, etc.).   
Pages and Nisus were by far the easiest to use, with Mariner Write  
probably taking the bronze overall.

Pages clearly takes the gold medal.  It is an exponential advance in  
the long trend of combining traditional word processing with more and  
more layout capabilities. Pages has been my primary word processor  
since it came out, but I've always thought my preference for it was  
arbitrary.  It wasn't until I did a thorough review of the choices  
out there that I realized how insanely great Pages really is.