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> Formal document testing is an excellent idea. I have never seen it nor
> been subject to it.
>
> That is, my docs are sometimes reviewed for accuracy, lessons tested,
> etc., as part of the product QA process. But, there is no specific
> documentation testing.
>
> Who is doing it? How large are your companies? When in your production
> cycle does it occur and how long does it take? What gets tested? Etc.?
Just last month, I created a document audit function along with a couple of
new templates for a client. The audit would check for such things as
manually applied paragraph formatting, styles not on the approved list,
figures inserted floating or not centered, tables & figures without
captions, manually inserted page breaks, incorrectly formatted captions etc.
Depending on the nature the problem, it would either highlight the offending
text, correct it, or prompt the user for a decision.
The reasoning behind it was that they want to migrate their existing
documents to the improved layout, and also that even for new documents, they
will be pasting in material from outside sources, and with the best will in
the world, they won't catch all problems with a visual check.
The audit macro takes maybe a couple of minutes to run on a 40-page
document.
Regards
Jonathan West
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