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Subject:RE: Using Word for book publishing From:"McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:Edwin Skau <eddy -dot- skau -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:12:21 -0400
I'm interested that you read "I have avoided spot formatting..."
as an assertion that I format spots. That level of reading
comprehension must be career limiting in a field like
technical writing.
Ahem.
Running away giggling, now.
-k
PS: So, how do you get your spots to stand still?
I tried treats, but the spots quickly developed
feelings of entitlement.
So I tried the whip, but that gets hard on the arm...
whip-elbow is a lot like tennis elbow.
And I've never encountered a spot with the least
sense of style.
PPS: I have found that Word reliably conforms to
its model, except when it doesn't. Most likely that's
because I haven't fully grokked the model. Some have
suggested that it's an enormous 11-dimensional
construct, of which only a few tiny, non-contiguous
slices ever intersect our plane of existence.
PPPS: It's ok to use 25 _BIG_ words. I'll wing it.
From: Edwin Skau [mailto:eddy -dot- skau -at- gmail -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 12:43 AM
To: McLauchlan, Kevin
Cc: Weissman, Jessica; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Using Word for book publishing
Hi, Kevin,
FrameMaker uses a list numbering model that is similar to the SEQ fields in Word.
No, I can't summarize the word object model in 25 words or less. Any attempt to do that would result in a definition too simplistic to be useful. But it's interesting that a technical writer needs input to be expressed in 25 words or less in order to make sense of it. I'd think that would be a career-limiting constraint.
It is also interesting that you format spots.
LOL
Edwin
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 8:32 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com<mailto:Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>> wrote:
> [...]
> Almost all problems with word seem to map to the application
> of superficial attributes (text formatting, numbering, etc.).
Numbering might be "superficial" to the Word object model
(and can you summarize the Word object module in 25 words
or less, please?), but numbering has never been superficial
to my documents.
In fact, numbering is kinda integral, especially in
complicated procedures, where nested numbered lists
need to behave reliably.
I have avoided spot formatting for years and years, in
favor of styles. But after using FrameMaker for years,
and then being hit with Word 97 and Word 200x, and seeing
what happened to my lovely styles, I began avoiding Word
at every opportunity.
It didn't help that numbering could do some amazingly
ugly things - where the only warning one had that
the horror was about to visit was the nearness of
an inflexible deadline. And people in the know
were suggesting that stable numbering could be
accomplished only by bending an unrelated advanced
feature to fit the task. Why should numbering
work better with SEQuence fields than with the
explicit numbering from the menus applied via
styles?
Mixing SEQence field numbering systems with the menu-applied
numbering is always an adventure. That's what happens
when other people get their hands on documents and
don't understand how they work, but do understand that
it's their job to modify content or add new content
for their specific project. Boom. Spaghetti.
Then it's "Kevin, there's something wrong with your
document. The pagination's all screwed up, the Table
of Contents won't update properly, and the configuration
steps in my inserted table won't re-number correctly.
Fix it for me, would you? What do you mean five days?
You're supposed to be the expert!"
Um, Bozo, I've got about ten days of work to finish
in the next five days, and that was before you came along.
-k
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