Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???

Subject: Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2021 17:49:39 -0400

Indeed, multi-level subheadings are tied firmly into academic writing, making the stuff useless for reading. In literary works three levels are about all the human mind can process, and that's when we've got something like Henry IV Part 2: Act 2 Scene 3. There, the actors present it in a nice linear fashion, and we need not worry that we're absent-mindedly looking at Act 3 Scene 2 by mistake.

One of the advantages of numbered subheadings is that a bunch of disparate authors can write their disparate sections that are all to be scrunched together. The blame for the problems in Section 3.4.1.2 can be traced back directly to Irving J. Jones. He never bothered to read Section 3.4.1.1, from which his contribution is a non-sequitur. But who cares? In academia nobody except the thesis advisor reads anything but the abstract anyway.

How does the PhD candidate get someone else to write a section? Easy, it happens a lot. I edited a paper for an ESL student who copied the bulk of his thesis from articles in Wikipedia. I'll bet his committee never noticed.

What the heck happened in Henry the IVth Part 2? I've forgotten. Hold on, hold on, maybe it's this:
Glendower: I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come, when you do call for them?
No, no. That's Henry IV Part 1.

Even dividing Henry into two parts is more than some minds can bear.

On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 16:29:54 -0400, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:

If "textbook" means that the finished product is intended for educational use, I would really try to avoid the use of multi-level subheadings. Some of the engineering textbooks from my college days were loaded with useful data but were otherwise unreadable.

Gene Kim-Eng


On 10/20/2021 11:26 AM, Nina Rogers wrote:
The book will be between 400-500 pages with 16 chapters, each of which currently has between five and ten level-2 subheadings. (As I read through it, I'm seeing a need for L3 and even L4 subheadings.) There are scores of figures, tables, and mathematical equations throughout, all of which are labeled and cross-referenced at least once (and often multiple times) in the book. There is also a lengthy appendix (case studies, included in the page count I gave earlier) and, of course, a TOC and an index. The current version has no table of tables or table of figures, but we may add that because there are so many. If we add more heading levels, we may also have a single-level TOC followed by a more detailed, multi-level TOC. That may not happen, but it's a possibility. So, lots of cross-referencing, math equation text (I see that FrameMaker has a "MathML Equation" feature, which is new to me but looks like what I would use for the equations.
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References:
Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Nina Rogers
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Nina Rogers
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Gene Kim-Eng

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