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Hummm. I have made a concerted effort to reduce paper usage here and until
the intranet is up this is a bit limited. However, the MAIN culprit is
meetings. Unless one has a large VDU etc in the conference room, one always
sees everyone turning up with printed handouts - from agendas to task lists.
As writers we work wherever possible on screen. A few of the softies prefer
to review in hardcopy, so we deliver it in that format. They form the only
hard-copies in my audit trail.
Mailing list messages are either deleted, or auto-archived to a holding pen
for me to pluck the gems out of into a third mail db. A % of this then
slowly makes it way into my book :-)
Steve Hudson
Principal Technical Writer
Wright Technologies (Aus)
steve -at- wright -dot- com -dot- au
(612) 9518-1822
The best way to predict the future... is to create it!
-----Original Message-----
From: Hart, Geoff
One of the interesting statements I occasionally come across here and at
conferences is the notion that online documentation "saves trees".
Interestingly, my experience is generally the opposite, but not necessarily
for the reasons you'd expect. Here's why:
First and foremost, I find the best online documentation often appears on
lists such as techwr-l, and since I'm not yet sufficiently organized to
maintain the tips and tricks I see online in some kind of searchable
database, I end up printing them out and filing them in increasingly
cluttered binders. I do someday hope to enter the 20th century* and make
this information more convenient to use, but I'm not nearly there yet, and I
suspect a surprisingly high proportion of our audience also haven't made the
jump to electronic archiving of such information.
* For those who celebrated the millennium last year because it "felt right"
despite vocal objections from the mathematically correct, who claim it
begins next year, yes, that's an intentional statement that I'm about a
century behind on my reading and filing. Alas!
Second, documents provided in PDF to save publishers the hassle of printing
and binding them usually consume twice as much paper as professionally
printed manuals. Why? Because very few of us take the time to print the
manuals double-sided. And while online PDF reference manuals are great in
theory, in practice I see more people printing them and putting them in
binders than I see using them online. Pace Jakob Neilsen, the reason isn't
that PDF is inherently unusable; the reason is that very few people design
PDFs to be used online.
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