Hacker News Reader

In a word: control. I don't know about you, but when I use Word I'm constantly fighting it. Of course, I'm rather biased as I'm a LibreOffice developer :-)

This is aimed at being exactly the opposite of DIY. If you're into DIY and it works for you, that's great! You should do what works for you. Many people don't want to spend time with a DIY approach and would rather go for a "done for you" solution.

Word doesn't export to .pdf very nicely. If you want the ease of use of word and pixel-perfect documents, you can buy Adobe InDesign. You can import word documents and fix the issues there, as well as better the layout. Once you nail down the export/import settings and a few macros, it's pretty easy. MS Office comes with a similar software called MS Publisher, but it offers a lot less than InDesign.

Print to PDF.