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John Posada reports: <<Everything you've said in the email is correct...and
in a world of more-time and more-money, would be applicable.>>
True enough; if the company doesn't consider quality documentation a
priority, then they're not going to give us the time we need to produce it.
But my point was that if you know you're going to be forced to ship PDF,
spend half an hour before you begin writing to consider how it's going to be
used. As I've noted before, it's not impossible to create a design that you
can repurpose from print to online use with a little bit of thought; that's
particularly true if your publishing software reflows text automatically and
effectively (which won't necessarily be the case; PageMaker, for example,
doesn't let you resize pages and then reflow the text without a fair bit of
tweaking).
<<What we see in most cases isn't because of ignorance, but it is "close
enough for government work".>>
Though that's also true, I don't think we should accept the status quo--and
teach it to students--just because that's the way things work. As
professionals, one of our jobs is to advocate improvements, and make those
improvements wherever we can. Like you, I've occasionally thrown up my hands
in despair and produced something I'm not proud of, but that's not the rule,
nor should it be.
<<the day that I don't have to meet a constantly moving taget known as a
deadline is the day that my PDFs don't resemble my hadcopy and that I figure
out a balance betwween font size, paper sizee, and screen size.>>
Here's hoping that day comes soon.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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