They say that 80% of the submissions used to be converted to PDF from word. I'd be interested to know where the other 20% came from.
I used to be able to eke out accurate page layout in MS Word, but it was always fraught and more difficult. But if you’re not perfectionist about layout precision, MS Word provides the same meta-data encoding function through the application of style (‘this is a heading’, ‘this is a definition’, etc).