[skissane]

> I thought the point of office was to be paid tools for professionals?

Desktop publishing professionals don’t use Publisher - nowadays mostly they use Adobe InDesign, 20 years ago it was mainly QuarkXpress. Also Adobe FrameMaker - InDesign is more heavily used for consumer-facing output such as magazines and brochures, FrameMaker more for technical documentation

Microsoft Publisher was always a tool targeted at home users, small businesses-even if some of its users were “professionals” in other contexts it was never a professional tool

[throwaway48476]

I consider small business to be the professionals I refer to. Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses.

[skissane]

> Professional as in paid tools, not desktop publishing businesses.

What I’m calling “professional” tools (so not Publisher) aren’t only used by desktop publishing businesses. Only time I’ve ever been professionally involved in desktop publishing, was when I worked for a university - they used QuarkXpress for official university publications, such as the annual course catalog. I wrote a web-based database to store the course catalog (somewhat unusual tech stack of Apache+PHP on Solaris SPARC talking to MSSQL on Windows - we had our reasons) - staff would use its admin interface to CRUD course descriptions, which would then be published to the university website in HTML, and exported to QuarkXpress for printed publication. Originally I tried exporting it as XML but found QuarkXpress XML import feature too buggy, had much more success generating Quark’s proprietary XTG (aka XPress Tags) format (which looks a bit like HTML/XML/SGML but isn’t any of them)

[s0rce]

I only used it for hobbies and school projects but I think I moved from Publisher to InDesign about 20 years ago. FrameMaker seemed too complicated and never really understood it. I typeset my wife's PhD thesis in Latex which so painful that I did mine in MS Word.

[Finnucane]

I still hold a grudge against Adobe for killing the Mac version of FrameMaker and not releasing an OS X version. I used it for everything. It was even decent as an editor. In comparison, MS Publisher seemed like a toy program.