geoff@pmafire.UUCP (Geoff Allen) (11/02/90)
This may take a while to get said. Bear with me. :^) Well, I bravely (fearlessly? stupidly?) volunteered to put together a newsletter for my church. I don't have a page layout program, and can't afford one, but I do have Word 4.0, and I'm certainly not attempting to do anything extraordinary -- just something basic, yet nice. I consider myself ``pretty familiar'' with Word, and figured I could get something decent without too much effort. And once I did it once, and had all my styles defined, future newsletters would be a snap. During my attempt, however, I got some behavior that I can't figure out. Perhaps someone out there can help. I created a graphic for the first page in SuperPaint's draw layer that is 10 inches tall and 2.5 inches wide, copied it to the clipboard, and pasted it into Word. I then positioned it to be at the left of the first page (horizontal: .5 inches left relative to the page; and vertical: centered relative to the page). So far, so good. My text flowed onto the rest of the page just like it was supposed to, but Word put an automatic page break about 2/3 of the way down the page!!! There was nothing I could do to get rid of it. None of the paragraphs in the vicinity had ``keep with next paragraph'' or ``page break before'' properties set. The break did occur before a table, but there was *plenty* of room for the table on the page (and Word will split tables anyway, unless you specify otherwise). I finally (after a couple of hours' worth of frustration) resorted to making the first page into a 2 column, 1 row table, with the graphic in the left cell and my first page of text in the right cell. Not the world's most flexible arrangement, for sure. Everything fit, even after I bumped the font size up two points, so I have *no* idea why Word insisted on an automatic page break at that spot. Any Word gurus out there? (Would anyone want to admit to being a Word guru? :^) ) I also tried using the drop caps style sheets that Microsoft supplies. I finally decided that they were more hassle than they were worth, for this time around, anyway. But that's another story. Is there hope for doing shoestring DTP with Word? Is FullWrite better enough at this sort of thing to be worth $39 (!) from MacConnection? Should I try to find a kind soul with an extra copy of PageMaker (perhaps an outdated version) who'd be willing to sell it cheaply (or donate it to a good cause :^) )? Should I hock my car and buy XPress? :^) Enquiring minds want to know. -- Geoff Allen \ Computers are useless. uunet!pmafire!geoff \ They can only give you answers. bigtex!pmafire!geoff \ -- Pablo Picasso