2011/7/15 Andreas Schneider
<aksdb@gmx.de>
At Friday, 15.07.2011 on 10:17 Cecil Westerhof wrote:
> Properly that anybody that knows how to write a document in Microsoft Office
> can change the document. So standard software, with a low learning curve. I
> had some problems getting them to accept to use Adobe. And now that turns
> out to be not a real option. Learning all the time as Benny Hill said.
That's absolutely not true. MS Office Word has a pretty steep learning curve, people just neglect that and take it for a slightly more complex notepad. It's not, as can be seen be the loads of completely unprofessional done documents ... not consistent styles, no auto generated index, no cross references, no proper bibliography (where it applies), etc. (Hell, I even saw documents where footnotes where done [superscript] and numbered manually.)
That's exactly the problem with Word, Writer, etc., that people think it's an easy to use tool, just because it's WYSIWYG. If you don't know what you are doing, you WILL do it wrong, even (or especially) with such an "easy" tool as Word or Writer.
I agree. But that is accepted practice. I find that most times it is more important to generate something fast and then have to use a lot of time to get things changed or right, then to setup things correctly (which takes time) and in the future can change things faster, more efficient en more consistent.
In a way I am even afraid that the better pleasing document I generated could be pearls to the swines.
Also with TeXworks it's already pretty WYSIWYG, imho. Change the code, hit "run", and see the result :)
Something to look into then.
> No the problem is not the layout. They are satisfied with that. They just do
> not want to be dependent on our company.
They don't have to. Give them ConTeXt, give them TeXworks, give them the source to the documents. Then they can do whatever they want.
I'll give it a try.
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