MS Publisher is an industry-strength DTP (Desktop Publishing) application.

There was a time when most of the features of DTP applications were unique to them, with Word processors satisfying a far more mundane set of requirements than they do today.  All this has changed, however, and applications like MSWord 7 now boast many of the advanced features of DTP packages.

There are a few features which still remain exclusive to DTP, but probably the single biggest difference between MSWord 7 and MS Publisher is the underlying philosophy of each.

Word 7 treats a document (by and large) as a continuous flow of characters, which have to be formatted 'in-line'.  Publisher, on the other hand, is 'object-oriented' - meaning that it treats a document as a collection of separate and distinct objects which can be moved, edited, or deleted completely independent of any other objects in the document.

While both Word 7 and Publisher can create documents that seem fairly similar at first glance, the underlying structure of each is markedly different.

Enjoy working through these pages!

The ChalkSoft Team