RE: Re[2]: [docbook-apps] Using OpenOffice as a DocBook editor

["Alan C. Oehler" <alan@xensource.com>]

Interesting discussion. I spent some time several years ago trying to
provide some operations engineers with a means to write standard
operating procedures in a consistent way. My main constraint was -- they
have to use Word, and we want all these procedures in a printable book
and on the web, in HTML, not PDF.

So I spent a period learning VBA in Word 97 and creating a macro-filled
template that would provide good print output and convert properly to
correct HTML rather than the horrible MS Word black box "Save As HTML"
feature. (This was before they made it "Save as Web Page" and wrote out
an even or horrendous pile of XML instead.)

While I was at it I created a bunch of customizations to remove all the
out-of-the-box cruft that appears in the menus and toolbars and provide
some special buttons of my own to apply styles (rather than rely on
picking them out of the whole set that was displayed in Word's Styles
dialog box). I even created my own heading numbering and list numbering
using enumerated fields rather than rely on Word's buggy automatic
numbering and put a bunch of elements into autotext so one could create
tables and admonitions with a simple click of a button. 

Of course now I then needed to run everyone through an hour-or-so
session explaining how to get and use the template and all the usual
basics like using styles rather than creating formats on the fly every
time...

Overall it was a fairly successful effort, but part of the reason for
that was that it was so clearly defined. But I still needed to do a fair
bit of gatekeeping and reworking to make sure the documents were all up
to snuff.

I've been kind of out of this for a while until about a year ago when I
kept failing to find decent-paying web development contracts but was
able to get decent-paying tech writing gigs... then accepted a staff job
as a lone writer in a startup...

-Alan

Alan C. Oehler
Sr. Technical Writer
XenSource, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Wolfgang Keller [mailto:wolfgang.keller.nospam@gmx.de] 
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 7:29 AM
To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re[2]: [docbook-apps] Using OpenOffice as a DocBook editor

Hello,

> The  problem with most tools such as OOo W is that they give amazing
> formatting features at the click of a button.

The  point  is that the whole functional and user interface concept of
Word  and  of all its clones (such as e.g. OO Writer) has been done by
people  who  understand  nothing  of  (and  imho  don't  care for) the
requirements  of  people  who  have  to efficiently author structured,
reusable documents of not-totally-ridiculously-trivial complexity.

And  that  due  to  its  ubiquity  this  functional and user interface
concept  simply  has  mislead  all  those  users who never got to know
anything  else  to  think  that  this  is  the way document processing
applications have to be.

I've  been using "structured markup" as a way of working long before I
even  knew that SGML existed and long before XML was invented. Because
I had the luck to know _other_ software than MS Word. And no, I didn't
know LaTeX either at that time, nor did I ever use it intensively.

Sincerely,

Wolfgang Keller

-- 
P.S.: My From-address is correct



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