markup language vs pc word processors

[Greg Strockbine]

Anybody have an opinion about these?

i work on a unix system, but company policy is to use
Microsoft Word for doucmentation. I used to use nroff/troff
and pipe it thru Adobe's ptroff to get postscript output.

The markup languages can be a bear to learn. Word has its 
learning curve too. It does make table of contents and an index
pretty easy though.

My regret is that I have no online documentation on the unix system
since I have to go to the pc and fire up word. I got use to Emacs's
hypertext, and think its pretty neat to have one file that can be
processed in two different ways: hard copy or online hypertext.

But if I mention markup language most people here just groan. Are they
really that bad?

I was doing a fairly big document with Word, and used Word's feature
of include files. Then I decided that I had to change a name in 
a bunch of those include files. So I fired up MKS's sed and went to
it. Then when I fired up Word most of the formatting had disappeared!

Are the markup languages out of date?
Are pc word processors just for secretaries?

	greg strockbine