Re: [GD-Design] Design Documents

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I have to reiterate: Word is a very bad choice for what you're trying to
do. It's way too heavyweight, gives the users too much control where you
don't want them to have it. I have seen it many times, and heard of it
many more times -- if you use Word as your spec creation tool, you end
up adapting your processes to cope with its weaknesses. It's just a
terrible way to create structured documents.

You want STRUCTURE for a collection of related documents. Formatting can
come later and be automatic.

FrameMaker will let you create structured documents, if you absolutely
must write documents with all the formatting in front of your nose.
Lotus Notes will impose the structure while you're creating the
document, so you can't break it.

But again, I'd recommend a simple collection of XML formats and a text
editor. The document doesn't have to be a lot more complicated than
something in HTML:

<title>MyTitle</title>
<subtitle>First section</subtitle>
<body>Here's the first part of the body. It can go on for a
while.</body>

A decent text editor (check out EditPlus) will let you put these things
in nearly automatically. And XMLSpy may actually go a lot farther than
that, but I haven't used it for the last couple of revisions.

And in response to another query, you probably have created tools for
art, testing, development, and production. Why not documentation?
They're easy to build.

	Kent

Philip Harris wrote:
> 
> > While not particularly difficult, it could still take some time to
> > develop something worthwhile. Do you guys think it's worth it to write
> > custom tools for documentation management, or do most of you prefer to
> > use standard tools such as JavaDoc or plain old Word?
> 
> Personally I'd prefer to see an off the shelf solution, preferably Word
> because people know it. I think that's probably too optimistic though :)
> 
> If there was a very strong Word to HTML convertor then that might be
> suitable, something that would split our docs into a series of pages and add
> cross referencing would be ideal. Anyone know if such a thing exists?
> 
> Phil
> 
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