2013/9/15 Asmus Freytag <[email protected]> > On 9/14/2013 1:24 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote: > > Reviewing hardcopy is still a very common practice when preparing drafts > for discussions in meetings. Even the UTC meetings may want draft documents > prepared with wide line spacing to facilitate the annotations duing > discussions. > > > Not the UTC meetings I've been to, but perhaps you have more direct > experience for that statement ?? > > No you have certainrly better experience (note that I used "may", and of course it would not apply to online meetings, where discussions are texts are sent in electronic forms, so printing is just a personal prefernece for participants, if they ever need to print these documents). > > This will help the review, simply because it is faster to anotate a > text ducing oral discussions, than using a computer and being distracted > while discussions are going on. Lots of paper hardcopies are used everyday > in every organisations, and notably in those working on legal texts. > > Lawyers also think that WRITING IN ALL UPPERCASE SOMEHOW MAKES PEOPLE BE > ABLE TO READ THINGS BETTER. Dunno, I'd stick with typographers and book > designers... >
They only do that in some strong statements, notably to explicitly dismiss their responsability. They know that we will have to read them more slowly, but I'm not convenced that people reading that will better understand what they read when they need extra efforts just to decipher these texts. They don't shout like this when they say they may assume some limited liability or when they add many conditions to their contracts (and they abuse of small prints in this case, to pack as many unbelievable conditions as possible, also as a trick to make sure that we won't read them). Lawyers are not alone, and even open and free licences are using this trick. For some reasons, they think that using some presentation features such as style is not viable for their documents, and because plain text does not offer them enough support for emphasis, uppercase is used and abused.
