when last we saw our hero (Wednesday, Jun 05, 2002), Florin Iucha was madly tapping out: > On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 08:06:43AM -0500, steve ulrich wrote: > > > > i'll take issue with the notion that you need to beat your head > > against the wall to create a professional quality document with word. > > there are millions of people who do precisely that with word every day > > and i've seen very few with pronounced head trauma. > > Oh, puh-lease. > > You have seen "millions" succesfull, happy word users and only "very few > with _pronounced_ head trauma"? you'll note i said people who create professional quality documents with word - i didn't say they were happy, or successful. people who have any experience with word and managing documents which have any structure realize that they need to use the appropriate templates. there are really nice hooks for creating and managing very large documents inside word. i use these tools every day as do thousands of engineers in the company i work for. i have access to a document repository of 16k+ of highly formatted and structured documents, 80% of these documents are generated in word or my other favorite large document editor framemaker. using the tool with templates and the correct formatting guidelines makes life a lot easier for everybody. that's what publishing guidelines are for. there's still no equal for the embedded object capability in word. i'll be damned i want to fire up a text editor and manually update tables that correlate data inside a document from a spreadsheet full of optical network models. while i'll agree that there are tons of people out there who don't create structured documents (letters, forms, moderately structured documents), which is the arena where TeX really shines, there are tons of people who create professional quality documents with word. you seem to forget that there are whole industries that create involved documents with complex formatting and structure requirements. legal, medical, government, etc. these people use templates, the appropriate formatting and create very professional quality documents. these people number easily into the hundreds of thousands if not millions. > That might mean that "professional" "quality" have different meangings for > Microsoft-products-using-people. how about using the following definition for a "professional quality document" - a document that is authored for consumption by an external audience that includes a defined document structure (includeing TOC, index, glossary, etc,) with consistent formatting (heading use, fonts, kerning, etc.). by that definition i think that the number of word users vs. the LyX/TeX users in the world is a tad disproportionate. > How about consistent laid out tables. Consisten use of styles and > templates? (ha! I doubt your "millions" know what a template is - almost > everybody I know just goes on happily with highlighting text and > changing font sizes and faces.) > > How about saving in a consitent format that everybody that has Word can > read? like anything this is a matter of using the appropriate techniques within word. education of the user is what is required. it's not a deficiency of the tool it's an operational problem. i don't see how anything that you've detailed here can't be accomplished with word and in fact isn't made easier by word. > > How about a decent charting module? (yes, I know about visio but at least > arrows that "glue" to the boxes, can we get that?). wow i didn't realize that charting functionality was something you looked for in a word/document processor. > > How about a consistent UI? Word 2000 now opens a window for each > document. Neat. But if you have a modal dialog in one window, all other > windows are frozen. Or do I have to upgrade to XP to get a fix for their > dumbness? i fail to see how this affects the publication of "professional quality documents". while i'll agree wholeheartedly that this is irksome it's not a gating factor to the creation of a document. > > florin, > > who had to edit Word documents for the last two weeks and that > made him really cranky... heh - i understand how it sucks to get a crappy document but that's not a failiing of the tool. just the users that you have to work with. -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020605/ce1594ae/attachment.pgp