On 29/02/2016 00:49, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Mon, 29 Feb 2016 01:29 am, BartC wrote:
20 years ago, when these things were simpler, MS Word had a mind of its
own even then. I had to produce a manual of few hundred pages, with
diagrams and images, and it just wasn't going to happen. Not without
spending a year on it. And employing someone to do it cost thousands.
So you're saying that somebody else knew how to do it, but you didn't, so it
would take you a year?
An outsider would be using their own methods, perhaps some more apt DTP
solution; I wouldn't know.
I find it hard to believe that Word 20 years ago couldn't deal with
something as small as a couple of hundred pages with diagrams.
Possibly, but just because it could, maybe it does so in a complicated
manner. Or maybe it's wasn't flexible. Or maybe some things I needed
just weren't possible.
(How did it do contents, appendices, indices, references to labelled
items in the rest of the text? One manual I did was for the very script
language I was using: how could Word render code, and do so with
automatic highlighting (eg boldening) of keywords for a language it knew
nothing about?)
And my experience is that a lot of these things were incredibly fiddly
anyway. I'm really the sort of guy who needs to have separate plain-text
and rendered verions of a document.
I find it
much easier to believe that you're the sort of guy who would rather spend
three days inventing your solution from scratch (involving your own custom
programming language no less) than three hours reading the manual of the
existing solution.
The language wasn't created just for this purpose. It was part of the
application the manual was about. And in fact it had its own manual
later on. The graphics application was also the one used to preview the
rendered pages before sending them off to a Postscript printer.
(And actually some of the diagrams were in a 3D vector format belonging
to the application, a projection of which could sent as vector graphics
to PS; I would have needed to rasterise them for Word.
So in some ways, my solution was more sophisticated than using Word.)
In the end I spent a week or two throwing together some simple mark-up
language, written in my own editor, which was then processed by my own
script language and ending up (via my own graphics software along the
way) as Postscript. The results were perfect.
/s/three days/two weeks/
Actually I can't remember how long it took. I know I spent some time
building font-data tables for the fonts which only existed inside the
Postscript printer.
(Have you ever had a situation where you have to edit a bit of text
where a word is in italic or has some particular style. You delete the
word, and try and add some more text, but it persists in using the style
of the deleted text rather than the current style.
You know that Word lets you reset the style to plain (Roman) text? There's
no need to delete the entire line, let alone the entire document. Text
styles are toggled: just hit Ctrl-I (or is it Ctrl-Shift-I, it's been a
while since I've used Word) to toggle italic on and off. Even if the
current paragraph defaults to italic, you can still toggle it off that way.
Yes but you have to keep doing it. It's not just Word; even Thunderbird
(which I'm using right now) sometimes gets in a twist about quoted text
(shown in blue) and new text shown in black. It wouldn't matter but
quoted text doesn't wrap at the ends of lines.
It also keeps screwing up any copy and paste that happens to have
indents. Here's one example:
One
Two
Three
And if I do a simple copy and paste:
One
Two
Three
And it's not always as simple as just stripping leading spaces;
sometimes they are just munged. And I haven't even posted yet which
often gives yet more unexpected results.
Now someone is going to tell me what I'm doing wrong. I need to set X in
Y to Z; obviously! The point is that it should Just Work. Multiply these
little things by dozens of examples and you will see how using Other
People's Software can often be a complete pain.
--
Bartc
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