Framemaker is still alive, as is QUark Xpress and Adobe Whatsis. Acrobat, IMHO, is a valuable tool, and I haven't had much trouble with it. Some. THere are a free genuined Word competitors out there, notably OPen Office and Apple's Pages (simple but adequate for most uses). But it would be a shame for Word to surrended its niche as the standard of full-featured WPers for that huge middle ground that calls for more than a simple text program and less than a full-blown page layout program.

A