intuitiveness in writing tools

["Craig Ede" <craig.ede@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

snip>
Word wins in this example because it is more intuitive!
<unsnip

Word loses in the kinds of documents that I have to handle because it is
format oriented rather than structure oriented. The vast majority of
Word documents I see don't even use styles, having all the differently
formatted paragraphs as formatted-as-they-went versions of the Normal
Style.

"Hmm, I need a large bolded font now. Lets formats this line of the
Normal style as 18 pt, bolded Helvetica (and next time, I'll use Arial,
or Times for this 'heading'.)"

This is the intuitive nature of word; the writer can change the look
some characters easily while structure breezes out the window. 

Give me FrameMaker any day if I'm given the chance to mention to the
user's I support (usually engineers) that it is better to have a named
set of entities ("tags") that are used to structure the document. This
is infinitely more intuitive as regards structure (because the tags have
structural relationships, get it!) than the breezy non-structural format
intuitions provoked by Word. Not to say that you can't use Styles in
Word (and Templates, even), but the interface causes most uses to
intuitively screw the structure up.

Craig Ede
Los Jugadores Bazutadores
-snip--
Subject: Re: Rumors of FrameMaker's Death are Untrue, says Adobe
From: John Olds <Jolds@sprynet.com>
Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 12:35:27 -0400

One must recall  that tools such as Frame and Pagemaker used to be the
domain of
the composition dept..  People who excelled in structure and formatting.
The Technical Writers  role is to emphasis the document content.  The TW
is a
project manger of sorts, who gathers  information, interviews subject
matter
experts (SMEs), coordinates doc. reviews and art development.  In short,
TWs
keep doc. development on track and team members on the same page.

The more composition work we become involved in the  more all of the
above
suffers.
Word wins in this example because it is more intuitive!
--unsnip--

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