[Sigia-l] multidoctype publishing: from Visio and Word: sugg estions?

[Duich McKay]

I believe people who are involved in basic structured documentation will be
repelled and confused by page make up programs. Witness the problems people
have defining a text box in Quark, PageMaker or InDesign. I think the days
of these as office tools is over.

I think Word is the best tool for structuring and growing documents just
because its the best of the de facto standards. I've been doing some work
for the UK government and its just assumed you have Word.

Sure its buggy in importing graphics (though my trusty old Word 98 on my Mac
is quite robust) but it seems the best tool for sharing working documents.
Bitmap versions are fine if you are strict about versioning. I've given up
caring about output quality from Visio - in documentation people don't
really care and from a designer's viewpoint uncontrollable (or unusable).

I have yet to have to incorporate Visio files into Word docs on a regular
basis but I usually convert Visio docs to PDF.

Are there not touch up plugins for Acrobat that will get it ready for
publication? Though I don't see it ever becoming an authoring program.
---
Duich McKay
http://www.duich.com


> From: Listera <listera at rcn.com>
> Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 03:34:22 -0400
> To: sigia-l at asis.org
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] multidoctype publishing: from Visio and Word:  sugg
> estions?
> 
> "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" wrote:
> 
>> Another advantage to embedded GIFs is that they are a lot easier to
>> manipulate and move around in your Word document.
> 
> I know where you're coming from, but I can't over the notion of taking
> what's essentially vector art, throwing away its principal attribute
> (scalability) by freezing it into a bitmap and sticking it into an app that
> can barely handle text :-) Ouch.
> 
> How come folks don't use layout programs like QuarkXPress or inDesign to
> handle disparate vector/raster formats (not Visio, of course) with PDF, XML,
> TOC, indexing, page numbering, robust printing, etc., functionalities? Is it
> the learning curve? Price? Specific formats not supported? Habit?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Ziya
> 
> 
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