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Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???

Subject: Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???
From: Nina Barzgaran <nina -dot- barzgaran -at- barzgaran -dot- at>
To: Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 10:10:39 +0200

Hello,

I enjoyed reading all the tips about this matter so far!

But when you come to think of it, truly, it's a 'book' you are about to 'publish'.
Good, old 'Desktop Publishing' is what you are looking at.

Collaboration for a one-time project and a large bulk of documents inside Word may be alright.
But if this is to be kept and maintained for years and even be delivered - i.e. 'published' - to other formats and channels, I'd really re-consider:
The time it needs to train people on a proper tool may seem a lot, at first.

But the time and hassle and nerves of all concerned you will save in the long run using a proper tool / CMS cannot be overestimated!

There are even tools out there, cloud as well as local clients, that allow for easy and seamless import of Word docs. Although, if for long-time use, I would not recommend it.

Office suites these days can do a lot of things, but they are not and never were meant for 'desktop publishing'.

My favourite example is this, bluntly put: "If you use garden shears to mow the lawn, you will run into problems - even if you plug on (in ;-) ) additional gadgets."

All the best!
Nina

---

Nina Barzgaran, M.A.

Vienna
Austria

Am 20.10.2021 23:49, schrieb Peter Neilson:

Indeed, multi-level subheadings are tied firmly into academic writing, making the stuff useless for reading. In literary works three levels are about all the human mind can process, and that's when we've got something like Henry IV Part 2: Act 2 Scene 3. There, the actors present it in a nice linear fashion, and we need not worry that we're absent-mindedly looking at Act 3 Scene 2 by mistake.

One of the advantages of numbered subheadings is that a bunch of disparate authors can write their disparate sections that are all to be scrunched together. The blame for the problems in Section 3.4.1.2 can be traced back directly to Irving J. Jones. He never bothered to read Section 3.4.1.1, from which his contribution is a non-sequitur. But who cares? In academia nobody except the thesis advisor reads anything but the abstract anyway.

How does the PhD candidate get someone else to write a section? Easy, it happens a lot. I edited a paper for an ESL student who copied the bulk of his thesis from articles in Wikipedia. I'll bet his committee never noticed.

What the heck happened in Henry the IVth Part 2? I've forgotten. Hold on, hold on, maybe it's this:
Glendower: I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come, when you do call for them?
No, no. That's Henry IV Part 1.

Even dividing Henry into two parts is more than some minds can bear.

On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 16:29:54 -0400, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:

If "textbook" means that the finished product is intended for educational use, I would really try to avoid the use of multi-level subheadings. Some of the engineering textbooks from my college days were loaded with useful data but were otherwise unreadable.

Gene Kim-Eng

On 10/20/2021 11:26 AM, Nina Rogers wrote: The book will be between 400-500 pages with 16 chapters, each of which currently has between five and ten level-2 subheadings. (As I read through it, I'm seeing a need for L3 and even L4 subheadings.) There are scores of figures, tables, and mathematical equations throughout, all of which are labeled and cross-referenced at least once (and often multiple times) in the book. There is also a lengthy appendix (case studies, included in the page count I gave earlier) and, of course, a TOC and an index. The current version has no table of tables or table of figures, but we may add that because there are so many. If we add more heading levels, we may also have a single-level TOC followed by a more detailed, multi-level TOC. That may not happen, but it's a possibility. So, lots of cross-referencing, math equation text (I see that FrameMaker has a "MathML Equation" feature, which is new to me but looks like what I would use for the equations.
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References:
Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Nina Rogers
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Nina Rogers
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Peter Neilson

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