[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> P.S. This thread of mines grew on the attempt to convince my little >> cousin to adopt pmwiki (instead of M$Word) for her university papers. >> Does anybody have live experience on this? Suggestions, advices, >> warnings...? > > I don't think it'd be a good idea - to slow to edit pages that way, and > her university will probably have requirements on the formatting. > > /Christian > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > pmwiki-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
Engineering graduate and technical writer here. Lots of writing, solo, with groups, and everything in between. Largest project was 500 pages of QA documents. Much as I hate monopolies, I use Word for all but the smallest compositions, especially those to be printed. It's designed for it. More control over formatting (margins, page numbers), footnotes, and, very nice for large documents, the Document Map. I tried OpenOffice (or was it StarOffice?) a few years ago for my always-in-progress novel and it just didn't work as well. The goal of a university paper is to get the information into a specific, boring, printed format as quickly as possible. The easier the brain to paper path is, the better. On a website, you want the information to look unique. It's easier to read and edit wysiwyg than codes. If you get a code wrong, you don't know until ten minutes later when you render it; then you have to go back to the wiki-text, find the place you messed up, fix it, and re-render. Not fun, especially with large documents. A local copy of Word will be faster and more convenient than accessing the internet for it. A local copy of PmWiki means they'd need Apache, one more program to keep running, and an unusual one at that; and if local, she'd lose the benefits of something sharable. If it's a shared project, chances are the her coworkers will be editing it, and they'll appreciate a program they already know. Add the above benefits of wysiwyg. Notes and research could be either. Wiki's probably the best for sharing research and really rough notes, rather than having mulitple copies of a Word document going around. Although we managed it ok back in 1990; the track revisions, merge/compare documents was useful. I could see using PmWiki to upload and organize the documents. The time she'd spend getting the wiki to jump through hoops it wasn't designed for would be better spent elsewhere. Sigh, I think I may have talked myself out of using the wiki if I ever get back into a large printed documentation project. Still like it for lots of other things! Cheers! Sandy _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
