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Subject:Re: Paper Manual to Online Help - where to start? From:Greg Holmes <holmegm -at- tds -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 26 May 2004 8:42:57 -0400
David Neeley wrote:
>> How about *this* for "economical"...convert the manuals
>> to OpenOffice.org
>> and save to .pdf. Updates would be to the original
>> OpenOffice files, with new versions exported to .pdf as
>> required.
and then dmbrown responded:
>That's no easier than doing exactly the same thing in
>Word, AND they don't have to learn a new tool.
Actually, it is easier. It's built right into
OpenOffice.org. You don't need to install Acrobat. And
later your PDF button doesn't randomly disappear, the
Distiller "printer" doesn't get a stuck queue that won't
clear until you reboot, the full version of Acrobat that
your company bought ten years ago doesn't conflict with the
version of the Reader on your machine, etc.
>> One virtue this possesses--besides the *free* aspect of
>>OpenOffice.org--
>...which is no virtue at all, since they already own and
>use Word.
... until they need to upgrade to Word 2005, service pack
123456, to keep the main advantage of having Word (which is
to have that which so many others have).
>> is that its native file format is XML. Thus, once you
>> have the docs cleanly in OpenOffice, if need be you
>> could fairly easily convert them to just about
>> anything you liked by using XSLT.
>>
>>Thus, you'd be building a considerable amount of "future
>>proofing" in the process.
>
>Oh, puhleeze.
>
>So, she takes this document that a bunch of "users" (her
>word) have updated, apparently with little or no attention
>to the consistent application of styles (her statement),
>and it's in XML.
>
>Now she has an XML document in which all the elements have
>the same tag, the XML equivalent of "Normal" with a bunch
>of character formatting applied to differentiate headings
>from body text from code samples from footnotes.
>
>How is that any better than what she's already got?
For one thing, it's text, not a binary pile of yuck.
For another, it can be parsed with standardized tools and
programming libraries. Which, Word advocates always
gleefully point out, can't be done very well with Word docs
(though why they think that is a deficiency of other
software trying to parse the binary pile of yuck, rather
than a deficiency of the binary pile of yuck, is
mystifying).
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