Modern document authoring software works mainly on the principal that the author wishes to see what they’re getting – hence the whole WYSIWYG principal of accurate visual representation. I’ve been writing some pretty big documents the last few days in MSWord, and have come to the conclusion that I’d basically prefer not to see what I’m getting. I’d rather work with an interfaced that was focused on helping me write what I need to write rather than caring about what the final presentation format will be. I find that whenever I use Word I end up messing around with the formatting, trying to get it to do what I want and look how I intend for it to look, and always fail. The end result is that the content suffers and the presentation is still pretty shoddy.
I don’t think this is simply a discipline issue – it’s more like a usability problem to me. I usually spend my day working with web technologies that enable me to separate style from content (XHTML and CSS) only choosing to combine them in the final presentation format (a browser on screen). As soon as I start using Word, all this goes out the window and I’m forced into working with a printed document on screen. The default page layout even looks like a piece of paper. This is fine for knocking out a quick covering letter or what-have-you, but useless for authoring a document with a complex structure (like a technical brief or a proposal document).
Most documents more complex than a letter involve some sort of structure, with sections, subsections and so on. Yet all of this is presented and manipulated in the linear format of the output medium – and for what benefit? Why does Word (and editors of its ilk) trap us into a paper- and presentation-focused authoring environment rather than providing an environment more focused on content production? It’s such a poor and unhelpful way to compose a structured document.
This may require some sketches. I’ll get my pencil sharpened.
Comments
It was fantastic for organizing a long paper, and it’s integration with style sheets made formatting go very quickly. This also enforced a sort of separation between content and presentation—even if I was tempted to spend time formatting before I finished writing, this was a separate activity and used a slightly different interface.
Do these features still work as well in MS Word?
There are builds for Windows and Mac OS X, amongst others...
As well as handling MS Word documents perfectly, its own file format is sort of like xml - which is great ;)
It also happily exports any document to pdf! And it’s free!!!
The latest incarnation combines the old ways with SGML/XML/DTD et al..... a bit too scary for me at the moment as I really don’t have the time (or balls!) to experiment with all the new features on a live job ;0)
Features here http://www.adobe.co.uk/products/framemaker/newfeatures.html
Tryouts for Windows and Mac are available FOC.
Just type in XHTML from now on ;) Down with the .doc!
Some years ago I/we used Ventura publisher, now this was pretty hard going but in those days we ran GEM as an add on to DOS!
All text was processed in WordPerfect and all drawings were done in Gem draw. Ventura provided the glue and the stylesheet, it made a superb job of it. Being an awkward bugger though, I found the stylesheet thing a real pain; make one small change to that stylesheet and all the docs using it were knackered.... a bit too relative I suppose, but thinking back it had the right idea and probably still does. May be worth a revisit?
Those were the days eh? Software cost? maybe £1000, hardware cost? well about £3k for the 286 pc and the same again for a 300dpi HP laser...
Ports are available for basically any operating system you can think of. Have a google for it, you may be very pleasantly surprised!
I’ve written huge docs in it that have gone through many revisions and it allows you to do cool things like link to disk files and urls etc. Then at the end you can export its as RTF or HTML or whatever (Only wish they had an export to XML function).
In fact my life lives in outlines these days. Instead of hundreds of little .txt files with notes scattered around directories on my laptop I have them in the organised tree structures which are quickly accessed.
Adding new nodes is simple too.
Windowskey-A (opens it)
INSERT (creates new node)
Type node name
ENTER (confirms)
TAB (switches to window)
Type note
ESC (saves and minimises)
Woo! Long live outlines!
a Microsoft tech doc
a Woody’s Office Watch column
This isn’t to say I’ve figured it out, although some people on my blog seem to know what they’re doing. Good luck.
Mix that with proper headings and what have you and you end up with a nice document.
Hope it helps someone besides me.