What laptop brands are best?

[Autumnlicious]

Unfortunately PDF's aren't always an option. Many documents are collaborative efforts. That makes PDF’s unusable unless everyone has got Adobe Acrobat,

If you don't have a PDF reader, then something is drastically wrong here, considering that it is the de facto leader in forms-you-hate dept (IRS I am looking at you)...

and I don’t know anyone that’s not in the publishing business that uses that. Plus I've seen problems with formatting and tracking changes between Office and OpenOffice. I haven’t tried any of the other office suites though.

I've seen formatting issues between Microsoft Office versions.

That said, PDFCreator is your friend on producing pdfs on the fly. (It's a 'fake' printer driver that spits out PDF's).

DOC collaboration is an iffy model, less iffy than OpenOffice-Office collabs, but still uncertain.

The entire authors/publisher software market is a clusterfuck. I can't tell what I hate more -- Frame Maker or MS Word...