One would surely not be aware of any if they were not disclosed, now
would they?
Well, Jean was the most likely editor who used them at OOoAuthors in
order to get around a number of deficiencies with the master documents,
mostly. The rub was that she rarely, if ever, disclosed them--unless
somebody might tamper (remove) them inadvertently without realizing that
they were "features" installed for some workaround or another.. Then,
Jean might state that such-and-such was there for some workaround and
that it should be left intact.
Other locations for some kludges might be on the title pages of the
individual chapter files. Not disclosing them could "break" things,
though, if other editors would work on such files without being aware of
their presence.
A parallel in the computer-coding business is having a coder who might
do things to enable "job security." However, I am not including Jean
into that kind of group. I was coming up with hints and suggestions for
some future tutorials, and disclosing workarounds was just one of those
suggestions. So, I brought it up here.
In any event, I am not against the use of kludges, as they often are the
only way to accomplish some objectives with non-compliant
applications--like the earlier versions of the quite buggy master
documents in OOo. But, to be professional, those kludges really must be
disclosed whenever they are employed.
'Nuff said... I came across a bit of obsolete material recently while
technical editing the "Working with Templates" chapter. One subsection
refers to installing the Template Changer, which is now preinstalled in
LO. So, I remedied that. There is another area where a nonexistent
command is documented. So, that subsection needs rewriting, as I left it
for another volunteer to finish. Should be easy to finish, though. That
chapter had not been modified at all in over eight months, so it needed
work.
Perhaps, some volunteer writers who work with templates, like Jean and
others, might add some input to that chapter, as she is writing a book
on the subject, I think. I added some simple marginal notes in the
chapter about some very minor ways to beef up the chapter. Also, a
version 3.4 screen capture is needed. I will let others do the screenshots.
Another area is: writers who do not follow the formatting rules
concerning paragraph and character styles in the template exposition.
Using manual overrides (direct formatting) is a no-no.
Gary
On 10/19/2011 5:59 PM, David Nelson wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Gary Schnabl<[email protected]> wrote:
They can serve as a cheap-and-easy form of conditional writing because the
viewing (and printing) of the comments can be effectively squelched via menu
commands and other options. However, if such kludges and their documentation
ever become separated from each other, then numerous ambiguities as to their
existence and possible usage can easily arise.
I'm not aware of any kludges in the docs teams methods or the docs
produced. It deserves to be said that Jean Weber has brought a lot of
expertise and put in a lot of work to help us develop pretty clean and
methodical ways of doing things. Do you have any specific examples of
"kludges" to point out? If there are any, I'm sure we can find a
solution pretty quickly.
--
Gary Schnabl
Southwest Detroit, two miles NORTH! of Canada--Windsor, that is...
Technical Editor forum <http://TechnicalEditor.LivernoisYard.com/phpBB3/>
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