Originally posted by Marcus Green:
Woah, I can see why the word dummy or idiot was not in the book title 
I probably should have included in my sections of the book, "Written BY a dummy, not FOR dummies."
Naw, we assumed SOME level of previous Office-type experience as a starting point for our instructions. However, since SO is new to most people, we DO do some good handholding, especially through some of the trickier stuff.
With reference to why I decided to the advantages of Star Office to put together an entire book ....
Word only runs on Windows and I see a very bright future for Linux. Also one of it's greatest proponents Woody Leonard says that its management of compound documents leaves a lot to be desired.
As the book is not graphics intensive I didn't feel I needed the fine grained control of DTP (I assume Frame that Solveig refers to is Frame Maker?).
Star office is not perfect, but it seems better than any other paid for or free alternative.
Just a dirty little secret: We wrote the book using FrameMaker, not Writer. I DO feel that Writer handles book-building better more gracefully than Word does. But for long books, nothing can touch FrameMaker. If we had done the book in Writer, I felt I could have worked around and tweaked some of the master document stuff. But one of the most important things Writer lacks is the ability to cross-reference across files (like, "see 'Predicting Earthquakes With Sheep's Bladders' on p. 253"). Much documentation I've read says you're supposed to be able to do it, but that dog just don't hunt. We wanted to use a lot of cross-references in the book, so that wouldn't work for us.
As far as the "Running heads" concept, I'd go into it more here, but it's just way too long for the space we have here. I will, however, quote from the beginning of the section that explains how to set up this functionality: "This feature is one of the most confusing and non-intuitive in StarOffice; and if it didn't play such an important part inhow other features in StarOffice work, you'd be wise to ignore it altogether."
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[This message has been edited by Floyd Jones (edited December 21, 2000).]
You had to go and ask "the question":