This was originally a comment on a previous posting but I decided to give this topic its own entry.
I love Apple’s Pages application and I use it for my private stuff, letters, invoices or birthday cards. It just “feels” great, exactly like a Mac application should.
Unfortunately, it’s not there yet for my professional work.
A big part of my job is writing long, structured technical documents. Over the years I refined a set of templates and style sheets that let me format the text efficiently while I write, resulting in documents that have the very specific look I want.
This is where Pages doesn’t work for me. Even in iWork 09, its paragraph styles are still not powerful enough to create the visual effects I use in my templates.
The missing features are mostly related to paragraph borders and background colors combined with paragraph indents. In Word, a left or right indent also indents the left or right box edge. In Pages, a paragraph indent only shifts the text but the box still uses the full column width. Without borders or background that box is invisible and it doesn’t matter, but with borders or background, the full-width box is visible and looks ridiculous:
Another thing: It seems that Pages paragraph styles cannot be based on other styles, which I think is critical. In Word, I build hierarchies of styles so I can change visual effects in one central place and have them propagate through the styles automatically.
HTML is not even a bad idea; I prefer LaTeX for my important (longer) writings. Separating the content from the style seems important to me, it allows to focus on either one at your leisure.
I tried HTML documents like 6 years ago but it didn't work out very well when it came to printing. Probably nowadays browsers behave better and it would be an option again.
I am a total electronic document nerd and I *love* stuff like HTML / CSS (which can produce nice output with the Prince XML formatter) or DocBook / XSLT / XSL-FO. I agree that these tools produce excellent results, with a very robust, reproducible and reliable process. I’m totally into semantic markup and separation of content from presentation. I actually used things like this for a while.
BUT – there’s also the simple fact that in my role as technical writer, I actually need to, you know, *write*, and that is really where all these markup-based tools such as XML and LaTeX totally break down for me. When I have to concentrate on the content, prose, language and style, on how to engage the reader and get across difficult technical concepts clearly, then having to deal with any kind of markup totally throws me off the tracks. I can’t deal with the mechanics of the language and the mechanics of the markup at the same time.
Because a text processor explicitly supports the process of writing, I am also much faster and more productive in Word (and I spend more time in BBEdit and vi). It’s simple things like having a keyboard shortcut for every paragraph style in use (and I’m amazed how many people select paragraph styles with the mouse in Word). I’m also a very visually oriented person, so it’s a big plus for me to have the actual end result in front of me all the time, and not some markup view.
Of course, I can also do the separation of content and formatting in Word, and pretty well at that. My style sheets do exactly that, I defined them according to semantic criteria. I can still export to XML and transform with XSLT, if that’s what I need.
So, what I would need is a markup based documentation system that is WYSIWYG *and* very efficient for writing. If somebody writes that, maybe specifically for DocBook, I’d love to try it :-)
Until that comes along, I really like working with Word.
I can't imagine doing any document that requires more than rudimentary formatting in anything other than InDesign.
I have CS4 including InDesign, and it’s a fantastic program. I would love to work with it exclusively.
Two reasons why it’s not an option in this situation though:
1.) As far as I know, it doesn’t work like a word processor in that it automatically adds pages when I write. I could be wrong on this one though, I haven’t tried this in a while. With a layout program like this, pagination is more explicit, which is a good thing when laying out a magazine or book. In a word processor pagination is more of a side-effect, and in general I don’t want to care about it. I set up the required “keep with next/previous” paragraph style attributes and forget about the rest.
2.) Quite often the documentation is handed over to a client at the end of a project and they have to maintain it from that point on. InDesign is not a format they are comfortable with.
As for the “rudimentary formatting”, of course it’s nowhere near what I’d do in InDesign, but I think you can do nice stuff that’s appropriate for this kind of document.
Here are examples of my template as PDF and as Word template file:
http://www2.entropy.ch/download/marc.liyanage-structured-document.pdf
http://www2.entropy.ch/download/marc.liyanage-structured-document.dotx
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This may not sound serious but: why not use HTML instead? (Collaboration?)
I gave up on Word for real work around 2000 after realizing how much time was wasted fixing formatting glitches, wrangling styles and dealing with all of the file corruption bugs (this proved prudent: Word 2007 is just as bad, except that it doesn't appear to corrupt complex documents much). I find the declarative CSS model more natural for technical documents (and, of course, hypertext works a lot better) and with the various printing extensions the document looks comparable, too.