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I started working alone in the company. Due to so much pressure and Word
crashing, when a style would not behave, I created a new style, which may
have been the wrong approach but this was the fasted I could get the work
done without focussing on troubleshooting.
Bottom line, the documentation had many unwanted styles.
The technical writer with whom I worked created a new template with brand
new styles but we cannot afford converting everything from scratch.
So, he renamed a lot of the styles and we attached the template. Most of it
works fine and needs minor fixing.
One of the issues is that now, most of the documentation has a template
except that a lot of styles do not talk to each other and I have no clue how
to get rid of them without buiding everything from scratch. Having clean
documents is particularly important in light of the fact that we plan to
make a transition to AuthorIT. If we keep all this variety of styles created
as I needed them, it will probably be imported in AutorIT, or will it?
The other issue is that the guy that is in charge of the template keeps
making changes and additions which sort of defeats the purpose of having a
template since again, it is not backwards compatible with what we have
already created. For example he decided to rename "bold" to "bold ch",
"reference" to "reference ch", etc. As is, we have hundred of styles that
are not part of the template. With this renaming, we have even more of those
that will not talk to the template. I started a matrix, which took me a long
time to compile part of the style naming. However, these constant changes
and improvements make me wonder about whether using this template is any
different than not using one since there is always a discrepancy as the
template changes, thus making all the efforts useless. I am wondering how
you people use templates to improve documentation. Freezing the template
means that we don't have all the tools we need, continuing to edit it means
that the styles are not backward compatible with the previous template and
here we have new styles again that we need to get rid of.
I would like to get your feedback on how to implement the Word template in
an efficient manner and how to optimize it for the upcoming AuthorIT
transition.
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