What computer do I need?

[Feanor]

Last time I used words built in pdf engine it produced pdfs that were about 2 orders of magnitude bigger than using an external PDF printer!

[Jaded]

Last time I used words built in pdf engine it produced pdfs that were about 2 orders of magnitude bigger than using an external PDF printer!

Ah, so an improvement on their Save to HTML function then...

[rr]

Export to PDF is available in all current office apps, you can also install third party PDF printers such as cute PDF and foxit, you can even add export as PDF to the always on tool bar.
One possible gotya with the likes of scibus is that you can't open documents saved in publisher's native format, in fact I've never found anything that will.

[ian]

word ... will allow simple desktop publishing

I don't know where to begin with this... OK, it's probably fine, as long as you're not dealing with publishing professionals. Word is pretty rudimentary as a page layout tool, to say the least, but it has the advantage of being something that most people are reasonably familiar with so the learning curve isn't as steep. You will soon run up against its limitations though.

However, if you need to get a document professionally printed, at least Mac OS will allow you to export it from Word as a PDF, which is a big bonus over Windows.

I don't know Scribus, as mentioned by fuaran, but it looks interesting. It also appears to have a vibrant online community who share resources such as templates, which could be very handy. Might be worth looking into once you get sick of wrestling with Word.

Personally, I won't settle for anything less than InDesign, but that's the industry standard for my line of work so I can justify the expense.

Pages is acceptable...

On what planet exactly?

My planet, sunshine.

I'll agree Apple wholehearted broke it when they decided to rewrite as an iOS app. But for a quick flier for Sophie's birthday or a missing tortoise or comparison of Taylor Swift vs. Giant Laser Eyed Hitler, it'll do the trick and with infinitely less pain than Word. If you want to a full page professional magazine layout with bleeds, process and spot colours, well, yeah. It's free and it's not LibreOffice.

I use InDesign (the mothership buys me Creative Suite), but to be honest, it's overengineered for my incidental graphic dabblerings as it is for more people these days and the subscription price plan sucks donkey cock. I've suffered the entire gamut of DTP. My first job in publishing was wrangling Framemaker + SGML. Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, still laughs about that. Inappropriate levels of sacrifice led to 3B2. After that, PageMaker (remember that) and then Quark, long, dark evenings of dongle fever and what-the-fuck-were-they-smoking UI choices. InDesign is modestly pleasurable in comparison, but for me it's like using an 18 wheeler truck to transport a sandwich.

[Jaded]

Old Pages is way better than New Pages.

[ian]

Old Pages is way better than New Pages.

Sadly, Apple seem to have decided not to restore the features they pulled. At least their depredations on Keynote weren't of the same order. Yet.

By-the-by, for home use, I've eschewed Adobe, and use Affinity Designer and Photo. Given that they're v1 products so obviously not up there with Illustrator and Photoshop in feature sets (or bloat), they're very good. I think they have an Affinity Publisher in the works. It would be nice for someone to nibble at Adobe, at the moment they can pretty much charge what they want.

[citoyen]

To be fair, ian, I've never really had to get to grips with Pages. I expect you're right that it is better than Word - it can hardly be worse.

I use Word for anything that doesn't require formatting/layout beyond marking up headers etc, and InDesign for anything that does, but only because I've got it anyway and I'm comfortable with it. If I were in Tigerrr's position, I wouldn't want to pay for InDesign and it would definitely be overkill.

[ian]

For basic word processing and layout on a Mac, Pages is a lot less of a sweary experience than Word (and I have to use Word, so my dictionary of expletives is quite extensive). It used to be very good, but Apple in their wisdom stripped out the bulk of its advanced features a few years back. The benefit is that it's simple and straightforward, things like paragraph styles lack the labyrinthine complexity of Word. For layouts it's very simple to drag and drop images and text, contextual snaps and guides line everything up, and that's about it. Obviously, no support for bleeds, process colours and all that, but for kicking out a quick PDF, it does the job.

[Mr Larrington]

PageMaker (remember that)

I've still got a copy of PageMaker 6.5 somewhere that fell off the back of a previous employer and was used to bring the BHPC magazine into the Computer Age.  I still have the scars and, come to that, the original PageMaker files.

[citoyen]

things like paragraph styles lack the labyrinthine complexity of Word.

Hmmm, maybe I should give it a go.

[ian]

The look of amazement in colleagues' eyes as I change a format throughout an entire document by simply modifying the style is amazing. Even if Jesus skateboarded in and did his feeding-the-multitudes routine they'd be like whatever Jesus, I don't even like Cabernet Sauvignon and I'm a vegetarian and gluten intolerant, now this is a proper miracle, looks he's made it all go Comic Sans in comparison.

Then they go back to manually formatting every character individually and banging away like a demented monkey on the tab key.

[barakta]

*giggles* at Ian.  Yes, I have had this too. Even when explaining they OUGHT to be using styles for good accessibility reasons cos then our students can just use their own custom style-settings for their needs or it makes sense in a screenreader....

[Tigerrr]

Thanks for all the input. In the meantime i discovered that the local Apple store does 'workshops' and indeed there is one on using Pages tomorrow. I have signed up not only for that but a whole load of stuff on how to make the most of iPhone/Ipad/Cloud/Mac etc which perhaps I should have done a few years ago.

[citoyen]

banging away like a demented monkey on the tab key.

I'm generally against capital punishment, but you know, there are some crimes...

The space bar on every keyboard should come inscribed with the words 'not a formatting tool'

I've done the updating styles trick as well. It never fails to impress. The same person. Several times.

[David Martin]

The problem with word is that it makes it far easier to do it wrong than to do it right. I have no idea how to set up custom styles as it is easier to just pick something that looks right off the toolbar than to mark it all up properly. Most DTP is an unholy blend of data and display. It should be far easier to work on source with logical mark up, and apply a style sheet to get it looking right.

[Jaded]

The trouble with Word is that you do some text stuff then think "I'd like this to be a bold header". You make it such and the following paragraph goes italic. You alter the following paragraph to go not italic and it acquires indents. You fix the indents and the header loses its bold. If you need a life you go use another program.

[David Martin]

Haven't you found the 'are you feeling lucky?' format button then?

[Pingu]

The trouble with Word is that you do some text stuff then think "I'd like this to be a bold header". You make it such and the following paragraph goes italic. You alter the following paragraph to go not italic and it acquires indents. You fix the indents and the header loses its bold. If you need a life you go use another program.

And then you try numbering sections 

[ian]

The trouble with Word is that you do some text stuff then think "I'd like this to be a bold header". You make it such and the following paragraph goes italic. You alter the following paragraph to go not italic and it acquires indents. You fix the indents and the header loses its bold. If you need a life you go use another program.

Yes, the stupid 'auto-update' feature and 'based-on' combined with the fact Word goes about imposing the style it thinks you ought to be using (and most users not knowing what styles are) pretty much guarantees an intimate liaison with insanity and the spitting of the more venomous expletives at the screen.

[Wombat]

Yup, its in Office 2013 and 2016 as well.  OpenOffice had it long before Word, I think.  I only went to using MS office because I get it for £8 thanks to using it at work.  Word 2016 is even viler than 2010...

[barakta]

I won't bother going to 2016 then, 2013 is bad enough - the gui gives me headaches. 2010 is livable with. 2007 unusable. 2003 was OK but is creaking a bit now...

Know exactly what folk mean about the random-format-lucky button, it's infuriating. I have learned how to avoid it a lot of the time but there's no especial rhyme or reason for it.

[Mr Larrington]

This Unit endorses Classic Menu for Office 2010/13 which, while not getting rid of the Fisher-Price-inspired GUI completely, at least gives you back the old menu commands so things are where you expect them to be after twenty years of using the thing.  However, the person responsible for the behaviour of the <CONTROL> key in recent versions wants badly to be executed in a painful and spectacular way for Crimes Against Practically Everybody.

[Afasoas]

Happily use LibreOffice for most things these days. As a full-time MS Office user, I've not really missed it. Couple of formatting issues with documents created in MS Office and edited in LibreOffice or vice-versa over the last few years.
Google drive/docs - I swear at it daily.

I miss having a CreativeCloud subscription. I was increasingly using Illustrator and InDesign for a while. I've tried the Linux equivalents (scribus and something else) but they were, at least circa 2012, just pale imitations.