For the sake of this discussion it would be more interesting if you tried to do it in Word, failed and shared with us reasons for failure
As it is... back in 2005 my wife finished writing her PhD thesis in physical chemistry. She started it in Word XP and finished in Word 2003. Work was done along 3 years mixed on her university desktop and her home Toshiba Satellite 1000 laptop (upgraded, along the way, fron 128 to 512MB of RAM). Final RAW material had 600 A4 pages full of equations, illustrations, tables and images. Final thesis had 400+ A4 pages in a single document and was formatted on above mentioned Toshiba.
So I am pretty sure you would manage to do your book on Word. To be realistic, she could have done her thesis on Pages likewise, though I believe Pages were a bit late with equation editor at the time (but there were some external solutions to fill in, if I recall correctly).
Sorry I missed this when posted.
I hear people cuss and swear about graphics handling in Word. Now maybe this has improved vastly since I heard it discussed last, but somehow I doubt it. The fact that Pages was conceived from the very start as a blend of word processor and page layout app gives it the leg up. In fact a lot of people have pooh-poohed Pages because of the layout features, claiming that this made is it something less than a "real" word processor. It's actually both, which is nice.
A book and a thesis aren't the same thing necessarily. My book is loaded with graphics and blends of single and multi-column page layouts. Any more complicated and it would demand something like InDesign.
Comments
For the sake of this discussion it would be more interesting if you tried to do it in Word, failed and shared with us reasons for failure
As it is... back in 2005 my wife finished writing her PhD thesis in physical chemistry. She started it in Word XP and finished in Word 2003. Work was done along 3 years mixed on her university desktop and her home Toshiba Satellite 1000 laptop (upgraded, along the way, fron 128 to 512MB of RAM). Final RAW material had 600 A4 pages full of equations, illustrations, tables and images. Final thesis had 400+ A4 pages in a single document and was formatted on above mentioned Toshiba.
So I am pretty sure you would manage to do your book on Word. To be realistic, she could have done her thesis on Pages likewise, though I believe Pages were a bit late with equation editor at the time (but there were some external solutions to fill in, if I recall correctly).
Sorry I missed this when posted.
I hear people cuss and swear about graphics handling in Word. Now maybe this has improved vastly since I heard it discussed last, but somehow I doubt it. The fact that Pages was conceived from the very start as a blend of word processor and page layout app gives it the leg up. In fact a lot of people have pooh-poohed Pages because of the layout features, claiming that this made is it something less than a "real" word processor. It's actually both, which is nice.
A book and a thesis aren't the same thing necessarily. My book is loaded with graphics and blends of single and multi-column page layouts. Any more complicated and it would demand something like InDesign.