[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither!

[Henning Follmann]

I read all the discussion about which format is better or not and how  
great it is that more organizations adopt open standard (which indeed  
is great). But I think that the discussion leaves out the more  
important option:
neither solution is good or at all suited for documentation in  
corporations and not at all suited for cooperation.

Here is my issue with this office solutions: they create a office  
document, not a SOP for handling dangerous chemicals or how to handle  
a fraud alert from a customer or ..., well I think you get the point.  
The actual information what this document is lost and is (sometimes )  
added back through the means of those document properties.
And then very important: these documents create a really ( I mean  
REALLY) ugly print out. Lets face it the standard settings in OO or  
in MS Office are just unacceptable. And most important most users  
have no idea about typography and how to create a document with  the  
right layout, font, etc. for the right job. And some try to make up  
for this shortcoming by using color, which actually make things worse.


Why are workflows like docbook -> xslt -> xml-fo are not more common?  
Or xml documents designed for a specific purpose.
Shouldn't there a easy to use xml editor which hides all the  
intrinsics of xml, validates the xml and has a decent stylesheet  
(applied in real time for the editing screen)?
I think that the actual user should focus on just entering the  
information. The stylesheet is the job of someone else.
There must be a better way of creating documents.

I am also not entirely happy with my LaTeX setup (I have classes for  
all kinds of documents and a makefile to create all kind of output).  
But here I basically have LaTeX documents instead of Office  
documents. I only have a decent printout at the end. And my 1 page  
document is not 100K big ;-)

Henning


-- 
Henning Follmann           | hfollmann at itcfollmann.com
it consultant              | www.itcfollmann.com