Hi Drummerboy,
I think the real problem with openning MS Word documents in a foreign program, is that Word's inconsistent and buggy use of formatting markup. MS Word can't even open its own documents in a consistent manner. This is a rather unfortunate fact, which I think is one of the motivations behind the PDF format.
MS Word documents with highly specialiased formats, like multiple sections, with differing margins/tabs/styles, etc, almost never behave consistently in any program, particularly when the documents grow in size, and formating has been edited a number of times.
One thing Word does, is it leaves behind formatting markers, for formatting which is no longer meant to be in place. This is confusing for any program opening the document, particularly third party software attempting to read a foreign file.
One way around this, which works reasonably well, is to save a Word document in html format, and then open it in Word, and save it again in Word format: this technique tends to drop the unwanted markup notation. This probably doesn't help you very much, if you are trying to do everything on your Amiga, though.
You probably won't have too much trouble exporting files to Word though. There are a few options to do this. I wrote part of my honours thesis using LaTex for Amiga, and converted the files to word on a PC for my supervisor. It worked well enough for basic files, but for anything complex, a pdf was always necessary.
Good luck.
Oliver
P.S. I've just downloaded the Pagestream 5 demo for Windows and Linux. This thread has reminded me to give it a try. Is anyone here using this? I'm keen to see how it compares to LaTex. The last time I used commercial DTP was Quark in about 1990 (I think). Should be fun. From the Pagestream site, I'm not too sure about the difference between Pro and Standard.
