Re: MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks (fwd)

David A. Roth (david@roth-music.com)
Mon, 15 Jul 96 03:30:34 EST

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In Regards to your letter <199607150458.HAA08897@vesuri.helsinki.fi>:
>
> On Sun, 14 Jul 96 23:15:59 EST, "David A. Roth" <david@roth-music.com>
> wrote:
> >> paragraph rendered preformatted, since there ARE SO MANY PEOPLE OUT THERE
> >> WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND TAB STOPS, NEVER MIND PARAGRAPH STYLES! (If any of
> >> you are wondering what styles are - oh, I hope not - please go read a
> >> recent book on wordprocessing. Or your manual.)
> > I feel like I have walked in on Plato writing his Republic here. Who
> > are you talking to? :-)
>
> While Lloyd's might not be the best way to put it forward, it is
> indeed important to understand that if you expect to write portable
> documents, WYSIWYG is not something to rely on.
> (I think I can suppress my need to comment on the feasibility of
> using Word for anything at all :-)

WYSIWYG works for Adobe's PDF files and Word has no problem that I have
seen taking simple text formatting as shown on the screen and
converting it to PostScript and printing it. It is reasonable to
expect Word/IA to be able to display correctly what it has just written
out to a file, especially when it isn't something fancy at all. HTML
can't be that hard to handle. :-)
>
> FWIW, the introduction to Leslie Lamport's LaTeX book gives you a
> pretty good idea about "structured word processing" versus "what you
> see is all you get". Read it (the introductory part), even if you
> don't want to use TeX and LaTeX (I don't).
> (I know this isn't the best reference that can be given ... I think
> the new edition was even written, or coauthored, by someone else? Can
> somebody provide a better reference, perhaps to a book more focused on
> this subject?)

While this might be interesting reading for a software developer at
Microsoft working on IA, this isn't going to be of help to a user that
is using Word/IA to handle the task of writing an FAQ in HTML. If you
move a margin in Word/IA and it isn't there after you load the document
in or when viewed by Netscape -- becoming a text processing guru isn't
going to fix Microsoft's software. I guess some are more interested in
solving Microsoft's programming problems with this, but I'm more
interested in know what other Mac users do who author FAQs and are able
to create HTML versions without the aid of UNIX utilities. After all,
I subscribed to this mailing list so I could better handle how my FAQ
is maintained. It was suggested several months ago to try Word's
Internet Assistant on this list. I got a chance to give it a test run.
So for now IA doesn't look like the answer to me because I simply don't
trust it. This is a surprise to me since I have been using Word for a
long time and while it might not contain all the features I want, it
has in the past worked as I expected it to.

If there are Mac users maintaining their FAQs as HTML successfully with
tools that run on the Mac, I'd be interested in hearing about it. I
know quite a few other Mac users interested in writing FAQs who would
like to be eager as well. Flames about Word in general and WYSIWYG
are of no interest to me and chances are great there are others places
on the Internet to discuss them.

David A. Roth
david@roth-music.com

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