RE: Re Word/Weird

[Chuck Martin <CMartin -at- serena -dot- com>]

I find it interesting to see the amount of energy expended on badmouthing
Word. It's not like other software doesn't have bugs. They do. Plenty of
them.

But here's the deal. Word never was really designed to manipulate long,
complex documents. Despite Microsoft's marketing mouths, many of the
long-document features seen in later versions of Word were added on to an
architecture that was still not designed for it. Thus the hoops we jump
through, the screwy things that happen, and the kludges that we endure to
get what we want.

Last year, when working on a contract, I wanted to get away from the
Microsoft/Blue Sky juggernaut to produce an HTML-based Help system. I tried
ForeHelp. After quite a bit of work, I was not able to create an
illustration made from HTML code: a set of small tables within a larger
table. I wrote the code manually outside ForeHelp and copied the code into
ForeHelp--which crashed and corrupted its proprietary database. Thanks to
backups, I was able to recover most of my work, whereupon I continued
authoring in text-based tools.

RoboHelp for years has been a nightmare of crashing bugs and usability
snafus. Both Blue Sky and Microsoft are driven my marketing's featuritis.
FrameMaker has oodles of usability issues that have never been addressed,
and there are things that cannot be done, at least not easily, in
FrameMaker, that are a snap to do in Word.

But Word gets the largest amount of noise because it has the largest
installed base.

Still, for doing those long documents, FrameMaker is probably better in most
situations. If a programmer needed a specific, vertical-market tool, he or
she would go to a manager and say "I need XYZ tool to write this part of my
code, and it costs $2500 for a one-year license, and it's the only tool
around that will get the job done right." The purchase order would be in the
mail. Why isn't the same true for a writer?

If you *know* that one tool isn't right for the job that you're trying to
do, and you *know* that another tool is, why aren't you demanding it? (Not
that the tool you want won't be any less buggy that Word, or cause its own
set of frustrations.)

I've made Word sing and dance before, especially with WordBASIC. But a
non-Word solution is no closer to an authoring Holy Grail. 

P.S. If you *must* use Word, get Woody Leonhard's "The Hacker's Guide to
Word for Windows" and find out how things really work under the hood, find
out what things don't work, and find out some very interesting tricks and
workarounds. 

--
"I don't entirely understand it but it is true: Highly skilled carpenters
don't get insulted when told they are not architects, but highly skilled
programmers do get insulted when they are told they are not UI designers."
     - anonymous programmer quoted in "GUI Bloopers"
       by Jeff Johnson

Chuck Martin, Sr. Technical Writer
cmartin -at- serena -dot- com 

<big a** snip>
> 


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