Ville Voipio wrote:
I am not saying HTML is bad and PDF good. HTML is extremely good for many purposes. Wiki is a good example of this, and so are many web pages. But as HTML is not necessarily a good form for a book, concentrating on PDF is probably a better idea.
I hadn't thought of half the stuff you mention, which comes of the fact that my requirements come anticipation rather than recent use (I'm returning to academia after 10 years being in jobs where the only writing I've had to do is reports in Word for semi-literate business people). I thought it might be good to pick and learn a system now rather than start with one format only to find deficiencies and have to switch later.
I can see a place for books and articles in HTML, but as a supplement to PDF for fast online browsing (and in that context I don't see a problem with just reducing layout standards). But I agree PDF is the thing to concentrate on for fully-formatted output.
Well, if everyone around you is using Word and requires you to collaborate by using Word, you are up to your lower back in alligators. On the other hand, there are ways around this. What I use when commenting on other people's texts, I want to have the texts as PDF. Then I just simply write a mail with my comments:
"p. 123, paragraph 2: Not so. Dr. Frankenstein proved this to be wrong in 1974, see Journal of Unlikely Science, 1865, pp. 1456-1505"
p.127, figure 2.13: I don't get it."
That seems fine to me, but many people are often so wowed by GUI stuff that they wouldn't consider using this rather than the pretty marginal notes that Word produces. I have a friend in academia here who does successfully resist the (sometimes quite heavy) insistence on Word. She just says that she's not willing to be forced to use the products of a foreign monopolist which has been found guilty of large-scale corporate malfeasance in multiple jurisdictions worldwide. Being a humanities-based academic, she can get away with this ;) Her colleagues yawn and tell her to use what she wants.
Really, I hate it when people send me their Word files. I am quite convinced I am not the only one. The annotation mechanism in Word is similar to almost everything else in the program: looks easy, feels easy at first, makes you run circles on the walls in the end.
- Ville
That's also my experience. I've worked in a company which has hired very expensive Microsoft consultants to come in and set up some Sharepoint+Word-based workflow for documentation. The system was so complex and fragile, it got dumped within weeks and everyone went back to hacking up adhoc Word docs again, copying and pasting like fury.
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