when last we saw our hero (Wednesday, Jun 05, 2002), Troy.A Johnson was madly tapping out: > Steve, > > This is a little loose: 80% of 16k are Word or Frame. How many > Word? How many Frame? i was curious about the breakdown a couple months back so i did a quick survey of document types. most of the documents were word. i did this across all of the documents that were in the repository which includes a fair number of marketing types as well. engineering docs were more often than not frame while the marketroids (who incidently still produce "professional quality documents") tended to gravitate to the MS formats. with the recent changes in framemaker to be less *nix friendly the balance has shifted to be more word-centric. all of the documents are placed into a reposity which uses an oracle back end for handling the meta data associated with a given document as well as providing really nice ACLs for controlling who can get access to the document and such. it's really slick. if you don't have word or framemaker on your workstation you can still run the documents through a pdf or html output filter which will handle most of the nasties of conversion. word documents can be problematic since many times they include other objects which don't render into pdf or html nicely. (ref my spreadsheet insanity). documents are also indexed for content to allow searching. (unfortunately using verity and not google.) documents are also virus checked prior to check-in to prevent infection from dorks. template use and structure is very much encouraged. especially since it makes life easier for people overall. it's not nirvana but it's the best management system i've ever seen. that, and forums where people can be flamed for doing stupid stuff in the engineering ranks tends to make people a bit more aware about the stuff that they do. all of this is really besides the point - it's a tool that can be (ab)used. if you have powerful tools that non-technically oriented people can efficiently use in the creation of complex documents and exchange them with geeks that's a good thing. use the right tool for the job. TeX/LyX are not the right tools for exchanging documents with people who need to do things which evolve continually. it's fine for a research paper when the content is well baked but if it's changing all the time and still subject to publication you need a different hammer. > > Word docs in a repository make me cringe. I have no faith that the > vendor won't use the format as a competitive weapon, leaving me to > pay the price (conversion, configuration, licensing, ...). That and > the potential for viral payloads (even now) gives me the "heebee > jeebees". > > Your place of work sounds like a utopian world of word savy users. I > don't live in a place like that, no sir. > > Troy > > >>> sulrich at botwerks.org 06/05/02 11:03AM >>> > 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. -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC