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S L A Y T H E W O R D

A N D Y O U ' L L B E F R E E

You hold in your hands something you don't see
every day: a book written on a computer without
Microsoft Word.

You probably think Word is the stumbling block--the first, last, and final

reason why you can't escape Microsoft software. But alternatives exist, and this
chapter is all about them. You can use commercial products like WordPerfect,
or free software such as OpenOffice.org Writer or AbiWord, or text editors
such as TextEdit, which comes with the Mac.

In fact, it was possible to skip Word years ago to produce books that

use graphical layouts. Children's books, for example, are typically composed
and finished using a page layout program such as Adobe PageMaker or
QuarkXPress. Large coffee table books with high-quality photographs are
nearly always composed in page layout programs, because only those programs
can do justice to reproducing the photographs in a proper graphical layout.
Text, formatted or otherwise, has always been the easiest type of data to proc-
ess. So it stands to reason that it must be possible to use an alternative to Word.

And yet, so many people continue to use Word because they need to

work with Word documents. Some swear by it, and others swear at it. The
application has been around far too long; people should have other choices

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