Re: Data on formatting vs. content-authoring hours?

[Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca>]

Michael Smith wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of research/citeable data that's been published on
> how much time people using traditional word-processing/office
> applications -- Microsoft Word, etc. -- spend dealing with making
> formatting/presentational changes to their documents ("fiddling with
> fonts and margins") versus how much time they spend actually
> organizing and writing their content?

I don't have a URL and hope you'll post it if you find it.

There was a study some years back (late 80s?) done at Bell labs or one
of the other AT&T dep'ts that compared two groups of experienced tech
writers documenting the same product. One group used a WYSWYG system
(Interleaf?) and the other used the vi text editor with troff formatting
the output.

The vi/troff gang produced equally good docs much faster.

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