Hi Elliott:
{Giggle} It's just after midday in the UK, so Elliot will still be too hung
over to be here, so I can say what I like about him
)
That is a good thing. Were they to publish the XML structures and
isolate the 'language' side of what they were trying to achieve with
VBA to a .NET muncher that operated separately. (Eek - that is starting
to sound lke CyberDog - maybe third time lucky!)
They already did that. You want a copy?
Word has presented inexperienced users with far too many choices, many
of which will either stop them getting started, or even worse, embark
them on a lifetime of bad habits.
Yep!
These are the user classes who could use a tailored interface.
'home user and parish newsletter'
'corporate drone'
'technical author'
'collaboration player'
'publisher and standards setter'
Yep! (Although, we need to find some more "sales friendly" descriptions for
the categories :-0))
Templates are a good try, but no cigar. (Clive's templates in Bend Word
to Your Will show how close you can get if you can endure toolbars all
over your screens) His toolbars are effectively trying to create a
manageable interface to too rich a pudding.
Nope: Not even close. Not yet. Give him time: Clive hasn't really gotten
into VBA yet
The home parish newsletter people are the only class who need ever see
those drawing tools, like remove red-eye and all its cousins and uncles
and aunts. Nobody else in their right mind would sign off such
mickey-mouse graphics.
Except me
I use them more and more in the corporate setting. That way,
I can guarantee that the application will be around to maintain them when I
leave
Corporate drones need styles shoved at them. A publisher and
standards-setter should make the templates that any well run
organisation should have, and the drones would get electrocuted every
time they clicked on a font button.
Too quick. How about "boiled in oil"?
Technical authors will be a hard bunch to please. Their publisher
should set standards they should follow. There should be far better
tools for numbering and typography (and another long litany of things
I'll get to you off-list).
Yup. Numbering needs a re-think. Typography? What's that? We never print
things any more, so who cares about typography? {G, d, & r r r r ...}
There has to be far better support for
linking to and pasting proper graphics objects and table tools like
Excel.
Buy a PC if that's important to you
I'd like to see some open standards for XML structures,
Kindly remember that the "X" in XML stands for "eXtensible". The "syntax"
is an ISO standard. The structures must be defined by the Document Type
Definition, just as they are with HTML and SGML.
In XML, it is more usual to use an XML Style Sheet, which incorporates both
the DTD and the Formatting Output Specification Instance.
For Word, there is a WordML DTD published by Microsoft, which many people
use for run-of-the-mill documents, because it's much easier than hiring a
specialist XML Programmer to create a DTD for you
as well
as SVG or something else open-standard for vector drawings.
Hmmm.... We're not doing so well there. Office 2003 supports SVG output
via Visio. Internet Explorer and Safari for Mac support the Adobe SVG plug
in that will display the result.
Given that I am constantly nagging for XML support in Office Mac, I am
"hoping" we get it next time.
Collaboration should be a Word strength. But it isn't. Track changes is
off the rails. We need a full-on edit history and check-out check-in on
every document and sub-document. Oh dear, I mentioned sub-document. Not
a strength is it?
Master Documents are indeed fixed in XML. Visual SourceSafe ships with
Office 2003 Enterprise and provides full transparent source control and
version management -- would anyone on the Mac want it?
SharePoint II provides sufficient source control and check-in, check-out for
most requirements. We would need some "enhancements" to Office Mac to
support it. But this is likely to be a lot more attainable than porting VSS
to the Mac
Publisher and standards-setter is the interface that should drive the
others in an organisation. That way, MS does not have to hide all the
stupendous flexibility built into the product. Instead, if there were
an interface that could declare subsets for drones, then each
organisation could generate a document and support structure that sat
nicely with their management style.
That's coming, I am almost sure of it. They are currently putting a lot of
work into the "Task Pane" in Office PC. We know it as the Formatting
Palette. One of the things we have been asking for is an interface to allow
us to completely customise the thing. In Office 2003, the stub is there:
you can customise things on and off the task pane. In Office 2004, the
whole concept was improved and refined in Word 2004. The Word 2004 task
pane can be customised, and the customisations will stick. Unfortunately,
we can't yet develop our own widgets and stick them on the Formatting
palette, but I think we're very nearly to where you want to be.
I'll come round to agreeing with you on that. FrameMaker had some good
ideas, some of which re-appear in InDesgn.
If the clowns had simply kept up with its development, FrameMaker would be
the killer app in the technical writing space. They had SGML. All they had
to do was add VBA to it and it would have gobbled Word's high-end market in
a flash. If Corel can add VBA to its products, I don't know why Adobe
thinks it can't add it to FrameMaker. Other than the fact that it would
have to pay for the licence...
Well, dot-Net is a much more open product, so Adobe has absolutely no excuse
for not adding C# and VB.Net to their products
InDesign's strength is in placing text and Illustrations properly.
Which I keep arguing is properly the function of a Publishing Program. I
really believe that Microsoft needs to redraw the line: Word has gone too
far into the publishing space. It ends up trying to do two things at once,
and not doing either of them well. If we said "take Word back to in-line
graphics only, with wrapping but no floating"" I don't think power users
would miss it much, because inline graphics are about all they use.
If they want floating layered graphics, use a publishing program that does
it properly: the document you are making probably "won't" contain 2,500
pages: it does not need Word's bulk text processing engine: it just needs
floating frames
(ok, as well as doing fonts
and typography a million times better than Word does).
Well, fonts is fonts is fonts. You want "kerning". Again, I think you
should be using a publishing package for that, because its only use in Word
is for producing ransom demands
As for 'printing', this year it is PDF. I do hope that Adobe, Apple and MS can
work toether to perfect Word's print to PDF
Yeah. I wouldn't hold your breath. That's a bit of a Mexican stand-off.
In Windows you can send a single job in multiple sections and Windows
postscript driver will join them into a single job stream for you. In Apple
you can't: each new stream becomes a new job. Apple is convinced that
they're doing it the right way and don't see why they should change to
emulate Windows. I could suggest that they seemed to find a way when faced
with getting OS X to connect properly to a Windows NTFS file server. Bloody
"politics" if you ask me...
That's not as silly as it sounds at first. It is a bit like my
standards-setter interface - as long as you can live with VBA.
Sadly VBA and collaboration is broken. I'd want to see a far higher
standard of security before I'd share macro-enabled documents widely.
Yeah. You and the whole industry. Dot-Net is an answer, but we don't have
it on the Mac. They have put a LOT of work into bringing us AppleScript in
this release. I SUSPECT that this is because they can flip a bit in the
compiler and bring us VB Dot-Net without too much of a fuss.
Regrettably, I don't hear many people clamouring for Dot-Net on the Mac.
Let's face it, it took five years for us to become resigned to it on the PC.
Then all of a sudden people discovered that VBA enabled any pimply youth to
wipe out the corporate database, and all of a sudden everyone thought
Dot-Net was a marvellous idea. Know I sense that corporations have finally
discovered that Java is not as easy or as cross-platform as it sounds (write
once, run anywhere has proved to really mean write once, test everywhere...)
I have this sad but growing suspicion that Sun has done to Java what IBM did
to the PC (let the best idea they ever had slip through their fingers...)
Cheers
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
