Re: Layout program or markup language

[Max Wyss <prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch>]

Mica,

WYSIWYG programs are a bit easier to use, and give the user the feeling of
"control". That's why they are used so much.

However, in a technical writing environment, the document structure and
contents are way more important, and it may be a good advantage for the
document and its use to take away some control from the writer.

However, a structured approach requires quite a lot of preparation work
before anything can be written. This prevents many companies for getting a
serious look at the documentation, and then wasting lots of money for
maintenance, translation and reuse.

As you might guess, I am pointing towards a markup based solution (think
about SGML). If you don't set up a "pure" SGML approach (with an elaborate
DTD), it might still be very worthwile to use its principles and have some
kind of "implicite DTD" (in German: implizite DTD). This means that you
would have to set up a structure for your documents, and then also enforce
it. Then you can apply style sheets and get a proper presentation of the
information.

As you say that your developers work with MessyWord, you can be assured
that their only style they are using is "normal", and that they change
everything on character level... Well, you might think about removing all
those attributes and add the ones controlling the style sheet.

One approach (I am convinced of, but it is certainly not the only right
one) is to let the developers use Word, as it has some good features for
writing. You would then either have to convince them to use your style
sheets, or have everything as plain text. _You_ for bringing all of it
together would work in Framemaker or (if you dare to do the SGML adventure)
Framemaker+SGML. Here you can use the structure and properly apply your
style sheets. Output will be rather easy, and particularly PDF support is
very good.

For serious technical documentation I do not recommend Pagemaker, and even
less Quark Xpress. The latter because they are still not able to make
_tables_.

Hope, this can help.


Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland

Fax:  +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail:  mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch
http://www.prodok.ch



[ Building Bridges for Information ]


______________________





I am not a technical writer per se, because there is no college degree for
this in
Austria. I studied translation and knew fairly early that that was not
where I wanted to
be. I landed a job as a technical writer in a company that doesn't have a
documentation
department.... yet. My experience is also quite limited, since all I've
done straight from
college was work in a documentation department as a translator.

My problem is that the developers are currently writing the 100 to 500 page
manuals in
Word an it just isn't getting the job done, too many bugs and surprises. We
all agree that
we need to find another solution, but what?!  I read so much about
Pagemaker, Framemaker,
QuarkExpress in the mailing list and the archive. It seems that layout
programs are being
used over markup programs like TeX for instance. Why?