TO03: To use or Not to use Word
In the last issue of TC Forum Ulrich Thiele argues against MS Word.
My pro's and con's are different.
I am a freelance technical communicator offering text, graphics, translation,
consultancy, and teaching, and working for many different customers.
I basically use the tools my customer wants me to use,
knowing by experience that insisting on using any other tools
will normally lead to loosing the customer within a very short time.
My primary tools are currently
- MS Word 7 (Win95)
- PageMaker 6.52
My experiences is, that each tool has its advantages and disadvantages depending of the job.
- Documents with max. approx. 100 pages to be printed in b/w internally.
(That's about the biggest I have made so far. )
- Documents to be offset printed in b/w.
Here I normally deliver the document as a PostScript .PRN file
to the printer's photosetter, and with Postscript fonts, only.
- Color documents to be printed on a color laser-printer (digital printing).
- Documents where an internal writer/programmer/ engineer) is to change it later on,
due to current product changes and/or customer adaptation.
- Documents where fast & cheap production is essential.
I have experienced that Word 7 is fast to work with for technical documentation
mainly because of
- Auto-numbering of sequential procedure points,
which we use a lot in technical writing.
- MS Word's very good and fast table facilities.
Adobe Table 3.0 is hopeless!
I use a lot of tables in technical documentation,
both for data presentation, and to place text and graphics nicely side-by-side.
- It accepts many graphic formats, incl. TIF bitmaps, and Corel Draw vector graphics
(using Insert/Image only!).
- Easy cross referencing facilities.
Another thing we have a lot of in technical writing.
- Its (only a little clumsy) indexing facilities.
- Spell checker on-the-fly. Saves a lot of time!
- Auto-correction (adn -> and, etc.).
For long Word documents, I never use the main/sub document feature. It's unreliable.
Instead I link the graphics without saving in the document.
When the document is completed I change it to relative path
(using a Find & Replace procedure) for reliable file transfer.
To my experience the problem with long documents occurs
when the document needs the Windows swap-file.
With my 32 MB RAM PC it's when the document comes around 20-25 MB.
By using the above procedure, I have never had problems,
even with many screen-grabs per page.
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I use PageMaker 6.52 for ...
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- Color documents to be offset printed.
- Manuals to be printed on paper + Internet distributed as Adobe Acrobat files
with hyperlinks.
- Documents where my customer use PageMaker internally for their other manuals.
Generally, PageMaker is a lot slower to work with than MS Word for technical documentation,
probably 30% slower. This has to do with
- Its placeholder system, where whenever you add something inside the text,
you have to check if the end has passed the placeholder's end-mark.
- To set tabs, you have to go into a menu, and you can't see the result
before you are out of the dialog box again. No TAB-guide lines.
- You can't just make a screen-dump and paste it in.
You have to save it in a proper file format and then "Place" it
after a lot of selection.
You can't control its size by numbers either, e.g. using a macro;
you must hold down Ctrl and pull the corner.
For a color publication it is even worse
because you have to convert the screen-shot from RGB to CMYK
before saving and placing it.
I'm looking forward to learn more about Frame, when I get it.
I will most likely consider it a 3rd leg.
So far (Aug-97) none of my customers has asked for Word 97 (Word 8) files.
One (after trying Office 97!) has even directly forbidden me to use it for now.
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