RE: [Embedlets-developer] Re: OpenOffice

[Christopher S. <cs...@oo...>]

My opinion is that the end product should definitely conform to the one of
two accepted standards: pdf or html. This has the advantage that the effort
is exposed openly and early. Until I downloaded the Office Suite I felt a
little excluded and had to scramble to be able to read the existing docs.

The source tools should be irrelevant and not consume a lot of valuable
discussion time. I loaded the Office Suite because I happen to like it and
if there is a choice that has to be made Office Suite is as good as any.

My personal style is to use a drawing tool (Word, Visio or
OfficeSuite/StarOffice) to create the graphics then drop them into an WYSWYG
html editor (FrontPage, OfficeSuite, Dreamworks) as jpegs. That way the
final documentation output is produced as you go and does not have to be
reformatted for formal presentation.


-----Original Message-----
From: emb...@li...
[mailto:emb...@li...]On Behalf Of Ted
Kosan
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 10:28 PM
To: emb...@li...
Subject: [Embedlets-developer] Re: OpenOffice


Brill,

> The problem is not that its an XML file format... the problem is that in
> order to use it, I have to install and use a not-insignificant application
> that I have no interest in using (though I'm sure its a great app).

Well, you know, it pretty much installs itself and if one is mostly only
going
to be typing text and leaving the formatting chores up to others then the
learning curve is very short.  You should be up and running within 20
minutes
max.



> So, that's why I suggest HTML. If formatting is essential, doesn't
> OpenOffice have a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage or something?
> The current version of FrontPage is actually pretty good... not a lot of
> garbage... surely OpenOffice has something like that?

Sure, OpenOffice has a WYSIWYG editor but any WYSIWYG editors are going to
fight each other to have the document's tag selection and formatting placed
in
its own pet style.  I have tried this and it does not work well at all.


Here is my perspective.  I have downloaded and read through a number of
specifications like the Servlet spec, the JavaBeans spec, the EJB spec and
most
recently the new Sun ACE spec.  Most specifications contain a ton of typing,
formatting, sectioning and sub-sectioning.  A number of them also contain a
significant number of diagrams.

Since I bet I have more free time than anyone else on the list (you guys
have
no idea how much free time a university faculty member has!) the
responsibility
for typing in, formatting, reformatting and maintaining the specifications
we
generate will probably fall on my shoulders.

As I analyze this I am not at all looking forward to the prospect of having
to
do this work using raw text or even HTML.  Beyond this, if our core working
documents are in raw text or HTML I also do not want to have to go through
the
work of copying them into an office suite for formatting every time a new
version of the specification is released.

I am kind of stuck on this issue right now because it looks like we are
within
a week or so of actually starting work on developing the specification
documents and I would personally rather resolve this issue sooner rather
than
later.


What do other people on the list think?  Are we going to encode the core
specification documents inside of a modern, open, XML based office suite
format
or are we going to chisel it into clay tablets? ;-)

Again, if everone mostly leaves the formatting chores up to me, entering and
editing text using OpenOffice is quite easy.


Ted

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