> nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
I rarely read paper, but I find professionally designed documents much easier to read on my screens. It's such a relief to open a PDF of a professionally designed book, for example, after reading screenfuls of html.
Agreed. Here I invoke the wisdom of groff old timers and of younger CSS developers: where the latter stops being useful when a professional looking pdf must be generated?
I can prepare a decent looking document, or spreadsheet, with LibreOffice styles (CSS) without particular effort. With Docs should not be much different.
Have seen official government Word documents with formatting in need of assistance. Teams at very large firms share Word documents, via email, forth and back debating about revisions of text and numbers. Publishing was only the necessary last step.
In most cases authors use the bare minimum of functions to get the job done. Professional looking is something else instead. I don’t know where Docs stands here.
Also the average back office author knows a tiny fraction of Microsoft Word or Excel features.
Give them means to type in text, add pictures and collaborate. Templates for beautification. That’s all what is needed.
This has been known for ages. Alas Microsoft has a grip on governments and large orgs we know little about. CERN is an example.