Well I have to say...ok, I **want** to say---what is there to be gained by taking a single document through what appears to be a four-stage process, just to publish it? The effort seems wasted to me.
For professional documents---and a Thesis is certainly a Professional Document---there are powerful 68k applications like FrameMaker that permit the work to be done once, up-front, and then simply written. In fact, one might blame applications like FrameMaker, or the post-processing app PageMager, for the bloating up of apps like Word and Word Perfect into the monsters they became. FYI, Apple wrote it's technical manuals from 1985 using MS-Word on a Macintosh (with a brief intrusion of the Lisa in an attempt to make that White Elephant useful).
FrameMaker is certainly overkill for term papers, letters, &c, but it (or a program like it) is a logical choice for a document with footnotes, and index, a bibliography, figures, tables, and illustrations, &c. The amount of labour that went into using a simple WP for a task for which it was not designed and ill-suited is curious.
Moreover, I'm not exactly sure why all these steps were needed. Is the beloved WP not WYSIWYG? Were the other steps needed to add all the essential elements, like the footnotes, the index, &c?
The Mac ruled---some would say created---the desktop publishing world in the 1980s and 1990, until the advent of OS/X. It seems to me slightly absurd to go through such contortions to produce a desktop document on the best desktop document production machine ever built.
For professional documents---and a Thesis is certainly a Professional Document---there are powerful 68k applications like FrameMaker that permit the work to be done once, up-front, and then simply written. In fact, one might blame applications like FrameMaker, or the post-processing app PageMager, for the bloating up of apps like Word and Word Perfect into the monsters they became. FYI, Apple wrote it's technical manuals from 1985 using MS-Word on a Macintosh (with a brief intrusion of the Lisa in an attempt to make that White Elephant useful).
FrameMaker is certainly overkill for term papers, letters, &c, but it (or a program like it) is a logical choice for a document with footnotes, and index, a bibliography, figures, tables, and illustrations, &c. The amount of labour that went into using a simple WP for a task for which it was not designed and ill-suited is curious.
Moreover, I'm not exactly sure why all these steps were needed. Is the beloved WP not WYSIWYG? Were the other steps needed to add all the essential elements, like the footnotes, the index, &c?
The Mac ruled---some would say created---the desktop publishing world in the 1980s and 1990, until the advent of OS/X. It seems to me slightly absurd to go through such contortions to produce a desktop document on the best desktop document production machine ever built.