MS Word is a great product for it's main use case. I don't consider it a
good choice for technical documentation and neither does the Information
Developer in my team. There are many better tools out there, some of
which are free. Documentation in today's world can be published in many
different formats. Text documents, HTML, PDF etc. Documentation should
be considered code, which is why markdown is so popular. Documentation
should go through the same development pipeline as source code with a
pull request and a code review before being committed to a SCM and
rendered into product artifacts. MS Word is useless for team
collaboration. It's ok for a one person team but doesn't scale.
My team uses https://vuejs.org/. At the moment we only build HTML but
there are packages to render a multitidue of different formats including
PDF, word docs etc. Extensions are written in Typescript or Javascript
so there is a massive eco-system to pull from.
On 27/12/22 00:54, Charles Mills wrote:
I have avoided replying on this thread. It is not my job to shill for Microsoft
on a mainframe forum.
However, just to get the facts on the record, let me say that I have been
composing very complex manuals with included text and generated TODs and
indexes in MS-Word for years, and publishing them as PDFs, with 100% success.
Charles
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Bob Bridges
Sent: Monday, December 26, 2022 6:52 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Markup languages - more on the shortcomings of MS Word
Once we were done with Christmas morning, my son and his family took off for
other Christmas venues and I spent most of the day downloading MiKTeX (an
editor for LateX) and reading documentatino. Finding the documentation was a
bit of a chore and I'm not satisfied yet that I have everything I'll need, but
the web eventually yielded up manuals whose titles, at least, claim they're
about LaTeX, LaTeX2e, TeXWorks and MikTeX. I have a lot of reading yet to do.
This morning I emailed the Word document to myself and tried saving it as PDF.
Turns out Word is awful at that too. It skipped over most of the ToC and
jumped from there straight to the beginning of the second chapter, omitting the
Intro. I probably won't bother to see what else is wrong with it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
