Between having to constantly massage galleys after inserting new text; dealing with mind-blowing, piss-poor hyphenation; word and letter kerning issues; struggle with unsettled paragraph breaks that leave white space at the end of pages; and extra space at the end of numerous paragraphs where the program decides on its own to override “justified” and go flush-left . . . I am left asking the obvious: who on earth uses this software to write books? And if they do, do they really have all that time on their hands to try and make their page-layout perform even as well as all typesetting equipment of the 1970′s did with ease and without question?

Sure, I was using $35,000 equipment at the time — (and that didn’t include the cost of fonts) — but the demands of non-technical, text-heavy books, fiction or non-fiction, are really quite simple.

I’ll admit I haven’t been using “WordPerfect justification” or any special kerning functions — (I’ll try that, thanks) — but I have read several books on writing books with Word that I now find deceivingly and unjustifiably reassuring. I’m going to give it another couple of days before I throw in the towel.

How do authors get away with using a program that, from a typesetter’s point of view, sucks so bad that even with a 75,000 word vocabulary, I find myself speechless in trying to convey its breathtakingly, embarrassing deficiencies?

If I can’t solve the problem on my own, I may just finish the work with a reliable text editor and hire an In-Design graphic designer to produce and polish the end product.

Thoughts?