RE: [GD-Design] Design Documents

[Sellers, M. <mse...@or...>]

JC wrote:
> Kent Quirk <ken...@co...> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Agreed.  Either SGML (DocBook?) or (La)TeX would seem the 
> obvious choices and are the canonical solutions to this problem.

It depends what you're trying to do.  For us, Word works well enough for
most design and technical docs, and hasn't caused us to compromise our
processes or design.  We can save docs in HTML format for online viewing,
and back in nicely formatted Word format for printing.  Using more exotic
tools would just be a distraction from trying to get the *game* done.  FWIW,
I don't know anyone using SGML or LaTeX -- are people really still using
these?

Mike Sellers