[1]TECHWR-L Digest - 22 Oct

[Karen Lew <Karen -dot- Lew -at- QUICKMAIL -dot- LLNL -dot- GOV>]

                      [1]TECHWR-L Digest - 22 Oct 1996 to 23...      10/28/96

Thanks for the QuickMail. I'm away from the office until October 28 and will
respond then. If you need the HWM technical editor before then, contact Pat
Boyd or Mike Genin.

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Date: 10/23/96 10:04 PM
To: Karen Lew
From: Technical Writers List; for al
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There are 39 messages totalling 1602 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Win95 Bitmaps & Dithering (2)
  2. Word Masterdoc problems (3)
  3. Open Competitions
  4. 45 in pespective
  5. Intranets (2)
  6. Intranet Definition (3)
  7. Word Masterdoc problems: 6/7? (2)
  8. Help - Garbage in .rtf files in WORD 6
  9. Re[2]: Word Masterdoc problems
 10. FW: FW: Word Masterdoc problems (2)
 11. Deadbeat Clients
 12. Alternative papers: followup
 13. Client won't pay?
 14. Intranet defined
 15. Just FYI (2)
 16. "Off Topic" Postings (3)
 17. Gender in Prof. Writing (2)
 18. Fonts and Point Sizes
 19. survey (2)
 20. Client won't pay (2)
 21. More intranet than you wanted to know (2)
 22. Re[2]: "Off Topic" Postings
 23. Benefits & $$
 24. PDF Linking Question


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Date:    Wed, 23 Oct 1996 09:44:18 +0200
From:    Chris Hulin <chrish -at- CTL -dot- COM -dot- CY>
Subject: Re: Win95 Bitmaps & Dithering

At 01:37 PM 21/10/1996 GMT, Henning Bertram wrote:
<SNIP>
>And it it does give us a lot of problems. Under a lot of
>circumstances, this pattern will cause not-very-nice dithering in the
>printed matter (like, you kno,w huge areas with a checkered pattern).
<SNIP>
We found similar moire problems printing slider bars whose shade is made up
of a checker-board pattern of white (byte value 255 decimal) and light grey
(byte value 192 decimal). We found that certain reductions happen to come
out right on particular laser printers - once we found the percentage it
worked consistently.

Or why not write a program to change the offending pairs of bytes to a
smooth shade - it should be easy if your bitmap file is 8 bit and
uncompressed, and a bit of detective work will make the file header give up
its secrets.... or maybe I have been a lone tech writer for too long here in
the Cyprus sun...
Chris Hulin                    Tel: + 357 2 376671
Head of Documentation          Fax: + 357 2 377412
Card Tech Limited              chrish -at- ctl -dot- com -dot- cy
P.O. Box 552
Nicosia, Cyprus

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Date:    Wed, 23 Oct 1996 12:17:07 GMT
From:    Iain Harrison <iharrison -at- SCT -dot- CO -dot- UK>
Subject: Re: Word Masterdoc problems

 Janet Valade asks about Master Doc problems in Word.

 I'll tell you what is wrong with master doc in Word: It is
 broken.

 You may have been lucky up to now, but I STRONGLY advise you to
 make a backup of those individual files NOW. I tried Master Sub
 docs more than once (admittedly for bigger docs that you are
 describing) and sometimes they worked. Sometimes they didn't.
 Sometimes trying to save the document resulted in a file that
 couldn't ever be opened again.

 I think the problems stem from several different constraints:
 file handles, system resources and plain old bugs in the code
 amongst others. Use Master Sub docs for any time and I
 guarantee that it will end in tears.

 If you want to have a ToC and index that goes across several
 files, just use Word's RD field. That way, the entries from
 other documents get included. It works quickly and reliably.

 The only thing that RD doesn't address is page numbering. You
 have to manually start the second file's page numbering where
 the first ended, and so on.

 Word 7 seems to manage Master Subs slightly better, as did Word
 6 for Windows NT, but they are still not dependable at all.

 aster Sub Documents? Just say no!

 Iain
 iharrison -at- sct -dot- co -dot- uk

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Date:    Wed, 23 Oct 1996 08:18:13 -0400
From:    "George F. Hayhoe" <gfhayhoe -at- SCESCAPE -dot- NET>
Subject: Re: Open Competitions

The d