Technical Writing Using OpenOffice.org Writer (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Aug 26, 2004 7:49 UTC (Thu) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

I worked for awhile as a technical writer myself, and I could go on for hours about what was wrong with that company and that job. But yes, I did not just the writing but the layout and so forth. I used Xerox/Ventura Publisher and Word for the final products, as it was required, but I also did most of the actual writing in an old DOS text editor, then sucked the text in and formatted it. This is a much more efficient system I think, so I find myself heartily agreeing with the gist of what the grandparent post said.

An odd thing with Publisher was that it would sometimes inexplicably mess up certain things, text would disappear or refuse to layout properly. This was a well known frustration to the other writers in the office. I took a look at the data and found that it stored the text and markup information in a flat text file, which was relatively easy to figure out, so I often wound up fixing these problems for myself and others in the office with my trusty text editor. Kill publisher, open the markup file in text editor, clean up the markup, eliminating the cruft that had accumulated, save and reopen Publisher and voila, problem solved.

Don't even get me started on Word. Hate it. Not a big fan of OO Write either frankly, the whole 'word processor' paradigm is fatally flawed I say, but Word is the worst of the lot.