Re: Word Headings

Subject: Re: Word Headings
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: "Tech Writers" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:01:23 -0400

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:07:11 -0400, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:

I don't understand the problem. Just don't use them. Or am I missing something?

As far as I can tell, the difficulty, not seen by many of the participants in a multi-contributor documentation effort, is separation of standard presentation from content. If the style requires: "Use no more than two levels of header, H1 and H2," then someone STILL is going to use H3 and H4. Enforcement becomes then a task that has to be performed at the very last minute, rather than something that occurs naturally as part of the writing process.

The best enforcement of style I ever encountered was in a Unix shop that used troff--it's a markup tool, not a wysiwyg--and every markup command was taken from an official set of troff macros defined by a team we might call STYLECOMM. Writers and developers could not add anything or use raw troff. Need another kind of heading? Put in a formal request! IIRC, STYLECOMM was just two people, an editor and a troff guru. The decisions were local, not "Made in Redmond."
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