Modern word processors run the gamut from simple formatters to powerful desktop publishing programs (DTP). A person must decide upon the purpose and audience of their document in many cases before choosing which tool to use.
Desktop publishing programs (Aldus PageMaker, Quark Express), provide close to true WYSIWYG typesetting and page layout. They are traditionally used for documents intended for large audiences. Documents such as brochures, flyers, newletters, magazines, textbooks, etc. The underlying data organization for most DTP is that of a pasteboard or whiteboard; this is simply a metaphor for a posterboard on which a user can place anything they wish at any location. It requires one to first organize their information into some form of a traditional publication layout.
Word processors have been discussed previously in terms of their affects upon a user's information organization. It is worth mentioning that many utility tools now exist to aid word processors. These utilities provide such tools as grammar checking, dictionaries, thesauri, "quote generators", etc. While none of these aids are new their easy electronic access ensures that users will incorporate these pre-existing knowledge and information bases into their writing much more frequently than in the past.
In order to effectively create DTP documents one needs to have a bsaic under standing of standard file formats for both text and graphic documents
