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RE: Why Aren't Open Source Tools Being Considered?
Subject:RE: Why Aren't Open Source Tools Being Considered? From:"Bonnie Granat" <bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 18 Aug 2005 23:34:29 -0400
>
> Bonnie Granat writes:
> - Its Help is about as bad as Word's.
>
>
> Hah. You should see the user guide. Sentence fragments,
> missing punctuation,
> non-standard sentence structure, misspelled words, random character
> formatting and the pervasive use of the passive voice are
> only a few of its
> flaws. Not to mention being over 400 pages long.
>
> I veritably itch to rewrite it. :)
> Sarah
>
>
Back in the winter of 2005, I volunteered to edit one of the user guides,
the guide for Writer. The book was a disaster and was not ready for anything
but a thorough developmental edit, reorganization, and complete rethinking
of how the features would be presented, not to mention the actual
descriptions of the features and the procedures. I went into considerable
detail about how it was not at all ready for editing (needed developmental
work on the most basic level) and needed to be entirely redone. Also, the
logic of the organization and the manner of explaining the feature set was
so wrong that I almost didn't have the heart to put into words my opinions.
I managed to do so without hurting their feelings and in the end, they
profusely thanked me. They then asked if I'd do a similar review for another
book that was said to be ready for copyediting, but I got bogged down on
their Web site and just finally gave up in frustration.
Bonnie Granat | http://www.GranatEdit.com
bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com
Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
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