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

[Duich McKay]

Ziya wrote
>> 
>> "Duich McKay" wrote:
>> 
>>> Witness the problems people have defining a text box in Quark, PageMaker or
>>> InDesign. 
>> 
>> Let's see: in inDesign, for example, you click anywhere on the page and
>> start typing. Voila, you got a text box. Confusing, uh?
>> 
>>> I think the days of these as office tools is over.
>> 
>> 'Office tools'? You haven't done much publication design, have you? Let us
>> know when the vast majority of magazines, newspapers, advertising agencies,
>> indeed anyone that does pub design for a living around the planet convert to
>> Word.

Ziya

You miss my point.

Practically nobody on this list makes their list from publication design.
The nuances of of typesetting are just not important where documents are
passed around a limited distribution very quickly. Structuring documents
that can be distributed quickly is.

What we seem to be about on this list is a shared interest in the
satisfactions in laying down patterns, structures, environments and stages
for others to populate. The canvas metaphor of page make-up programs can be
a distraction.

I was a print designer for ten years and was trained to specify pages from
typescript. Page make-up programs seemed an answer to control over a page
but were often a distraction. Sometimes I miss controlling the entire page
but on the few occasions I design publications I find it a lot of effort for
very little benefit. I always find myself zoomed in on some detail rather
than the looking at the big picture.

Writing quick specifications for websites, used by thousands of people, to
keep ahead of development teams which will have a much bigger benefit to
people than most of the static publications I've ever designed.

I even done very satisfactory wireframes in Word, and found it a lot faster
than Illustrator - though that may be because of the program's speed rather
than the toolset.
-- 
Duich