The Writer's Kit

[JIMCHEVAL <JIMCHEVAL -at- AOL -dot- COM>]

Recently I got some gentle jibing from a client who insisted that I "should"
have Pagemaker since I was a technical writer.  My own opinion was that
Pagemaker was a desktop publishing tool and not a writing tool per se, and it
certainly wasn't reasonable to just expect that I would have it (I had in fact
explicitly said I didn't during our first meeting.)  Nor that writing services
would necessarily include printer-ready layout.

My question: what do members of this list consider basic components of a
freelance TW's kit - i.e., what's a 'must', what's a 'should' and what's a
'nice to have'?  I'm thinking both hardware and software here. (I've checked
the archive and we've knocked around lots of closely related ideas, but not,
so far as I can find, this one in particular.)

To put it another way, what should a client expect a freelancer will
reasonably have available as a matter of course?

Also, how much has desktop publishing implicitly become part of our job
description? Word has aspects of DTP, but my Word files have been sent
elsewhere for pre-press work. Whereas this most recent client expects it all
as part of TW work.

Comments?

Jim Chevallier
Los Angeles
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