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Flashpoint of the week: editors and writers egos? (Take III)
Subject:Flashpoint of the week: editors and writers egos? (Take III) From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 15 Mar 2004 15:33:19 -0500
John Cook observed: <<We create our documentation in FrameMaker and
publish in .pdf and other formats. I'll take handwritten comments or
online comments in .pdf, but I /never/ use Word.>>
Your loss. <g> Seriously, though: Word-bashing ignores the fact that
Word's got the neatest revision tracking tools in the business. I
wouldn't use Word for industrial strength publishing, but it does have
its advantages for writing and editing in collaborative environments.
Nothing else comes close, though WordPerfect tries.
In any event, there's always more than one way to skin a
programmer*--or in this case, to edit in a Frame environment. If you
have both Word and Frame in the office, you can use the two together:
edit in Word (after exporting the text to RTF if necessary), but
publish in Frame. Better still: I'm given to understand that Frame
offers a "compare documents" feature that lets you edit blind (i.e.,
without tracking your changes); the author then compares the original
against the edited file to see what you've done. Less efficient than
seeing the changes directly, but it should work well enough.
* For those who object to skinning cats, even metaphorically. <g>
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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