David Neeley wrote:
Stephen,
First, I should say that using terms such as "what silly nonsense"
does *not* impress others as having any sort of open or constructive
attitude. Instead, it comes across as condescending, to put it mildly.
The statement I criticized was: "But I think the creators of LyX would
very much like it to be as mainstream as Word."
I was polite. An honest description would have been: A blatant lie
told to cover up his previous ignorant remarks. There are no LyX
developers who are that stupid or out of touch with reality. LyX
doesn't have even a remote chance of achieving Word mainstream
status, that fantasy is a crackpot notion. It was such a pitifully
inept argument.
As for your assertion that "Word has failed for years as program of
choice for technical writers"--that simply betrays that you know
little of the current tech writing profession. Although I am new to
LyX and laTeX, I *have* been a tech writer for the better part of
twenty years, and am a longtime member of the Society for Technical
Communications. Although I personally cannot *stand* Word for tech
writing, I would estimate that roughly half of all the commercial tech
writing projects today use it.
Quite a few technical writers must use Word because it is required
by their employers. That doesn't make it the program of choice by
the writers themselves except for junior writers who don't know
any better and some fanatics. I assert that it is a fairly universal
opinion held by qualified technical writers: Word sucks for technical
writers. I saw this on the FrameMaker mailing list for years and
occasionally on TECHWR-L Archives when I monitored it.
Your estimate of "half" confirms what I said. Word should own
90% of the tech writing market just if it were a decent program,
and 90% or higher is what you see in small businesses that don't
have a tech writing staff. Your remark has no bearing on what
I stated. An employer dictated, must use program, due to employer
ignorance, cost of replacement, or other other obligation, is not
equivalent to the tech writers using Word as their
"program of choice".
You are correct, though, that the
"Master Document" feature is an abortion and has never worked
properly--and thus it is rarely attempted for tech pubs work. The more
compelling problem, I believe, is the brain-dead autonumbering in
Word.
Many projects within the tech writing field today are done in
FrameMaker, which Adobe has not *quite* managed to kill yet. However,
they seem to be working to fold more long document features into
InDesign with each upgrade, with their intention being to use its code
base as a next-generation documentation tool.
I know of very few shops using TeX in any flavor for tech
documentation--although it seems to be far more popular in academia
than it is in commercial software development.
That said, I have held on several professional mail lists for tech
writers that the LyX approach seems far better suited for
documentation than other solutions. Entirely too much time is spent by
tech writers fiddling with layout, and version upgrades are
complicated by various style and format overrides in the documents.
At present, I believe that there is increasing interest in XML
authoring solutions, with a document production sequence that permits
these files to be printed properly--although "printed" these days
increasingly does not include printing. Delivery in Acrobat format is
extremely popular and is rapidly replacing printed manual production.
Where I think discussions like this can be most productive is to
address comments on what you believe to be their merits and not by
dismissing them with pejoritives. Otherwise, you simply drive away
people who may be extremely helpful additions to the user community.
Maybe you missed my post where I said my description wasn't meant
to be an insult. I meant it as an objective, factual assessment.
I meant his idea had no merit because the idea was worthless as
there is no way to create much of an improvement beyond the way
it is done now. He presented his wish as if it were feasible.
Your ideas are also vague because you don't see the difficulty.
Rather than dismissing these comments out of hand with some notion of
what "cannot" be done given the present state of the program, why not
address the ideas based upon whether they are truly desirable on their
merits, with the method of producing such a result left to a separate
discussion.
This appears to be a false dichotomy. Nobody has questioned whether
an automatic .cls and .layout menu driven file creator would be a
nice thing to have. My objection is that it is wishful thinking,
not a feasible project and the people who don't know that, are
ignorant of the requirements. That it would be a good thing if
possible is so obvious it doesn't need discussion. I don't think
there need to be two discussions. Just one relevant discussion.
I will eat my words if Steve Litt, who does own a qualified opinion,
outlines how something fairly useful can be implemented. I am going
to snip the remainder of your post because I see it as philosophical.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride,
Stephen
