2005/04/20 21:59:00
Today I very nearly had to print out a document to read it. It’s been a while since I printed anything but photos and directions.
I have come to conclusion that word processors are not that good for writing documents in. I spend a lot of my time using websites, wikis and text editors and so the typical wordprocessor interface looks a bit cluttered and badly organised. Where is the nice set of links? Where are the sperate pages for seperate sections? Where are the mouseover text defining acronyms?
Perhaps it’s just me being a bit of a techy but I would perfer to be editing the raw html for a series of web pages than fighting with a 50 page word processor document. Perhaps it just that I can work better in vi than word. Who knows?
Take the interface that I am using now. It has nothing special in the way of tools, there are some buttons at the top for basic html markup but other than that it’s a basic text box. But I when I have finished, it will be a complete entry, ready for review easy to search for, comment on or link to. If I later decide to write another artical about how great word processors are on another site then I can link to this small bite of information without any problems. There is no need to search for a document, then find the correct section, just click and read, then back to where you were.
Still in the end I managed to find the info I wanted, then edit it. There are three of us editing this doc so I have to make my own copy, edit it then we can all manually match up our edits at a later date. With the multitude of web based colabration tools and patch managers there this is screaming out for anything but a word processor, except for it’s spell checker!
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