[plug] Why use DocBook versus Word

[Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Richard Sharpe wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have been engaged in a large documentation project, producing some 350
> pages of technical documentation over the last few weeks, and will be going
> on to produce several hundred more over the next few weeks.
>
> I opted to use DocBook because I can put the source in CVS (and thus do
> version control and have multiple people working on the documentation), it
> is SGML, which is almost XML, and I have lots of control over the final
> output, because I can change the stylesheets rather than changing the
> document, if I want to change the look and feel.
>
> However, it requires a fair degree of sophistication to maintain the
> documentation.
>
> Then someone suggested to me that the latest version of Word does version
> control, can include documents, etc, and can generally do everything I
> want. Also, with word, I can use someone straight out of high school to
> maintain the documentation. Thus, there is less of a maintenance issue.
>
> Does anyone else have any views on this?

Ask ANYONE that has done a large document in word... maybe an honnors thesis.
quite frankly it fails to be acceeptible.  I have heard stories of studnets
losing thier thesis.  While that never happened to me here are some of the
lovly advantages to using word.


1) After closing the document I had to reapply the numbering style to 5 out of
seven chapters.  This was not as simple as redefinging the style I HAD to
reapply the style to EVERY paragraph on EVERY page in those chapters.
Don't try telling me that it is user error it simply wasn't.

2) While Word does have versioning it does NOT have locking, it does not have
merging.  In my mind this makes the versioning useless, when multiple users
are editing the same document.

3) For no apparent reason your document will not save (open a new document select
all-cut-paste) .... funny thing you cut from the original document and paste
into the same document.  If the blank document isn't open it doesn't help
(don't say virus, it wasn't)

4) For no apparent reason ALL your inline images migrate to 0,0 on page 1 section
99 (and yes if you don't have 99 sections it will create them for you)

5) I don't know if this is relevent BUT it's a binary format.   you simply CANT
use perl/sed/awk/cat/any other text tool to extract the basic info from
another source.

Word is good for simple documents as soon as you do anything complex you'd
better be a good latteral thinker to make it work.


Yours Tony.

/*
 * "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the
 * same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
 * --Albert Einstein
 */