Hello Brian
Brian Knittel wrote:
There is a vast segment of the technical document space that is page
controlled; that is, pagination is not allowed to change, due to
governmental regulations or just corporate policy. If editing causes a new
page break, you can't just renumber the succeeding pages. You have to insert
an outliner page. For example, if the content of page 11 spills to a new
page, you can't renumber page 12 to 13, 13 to 14 and so on, you have to
insert a page 11a. Word's making page flow invisible to its object model
doesn't make automating the job any easier! There are hundreds of millions
of pages of documents out there that require this sort of control, and the
individual revision marking that I've been discussing.
I believe you that there is such type of documentation out there. IMHO,
I think it's archaic and such a "document model" should hit the dust
rather sooner than later, because it really is a model tied too much in
the physical, printed model.
When the documentation world was ruled by typewriters, this model made a
lot of sense. Paper was relatively expensive, and to correct one tiny
flaw somewhere you only changed that one page, had it retyped, and
swapped against its predecessor. But nowadays, many forms of
documentation have nothing whatsoever to do with pages. They might end
up in small HTML chunks, or on your PDA, or any other electronic gadget.
"Page" doesn't really have a meaning then.
Also, for "tracking" edits while a document is still in production,
there are new tools to go about that. By no means is Word's Track
Changes feature all one could wish for, but in a controlled environment,
there's not much wrong with it conceptually.
These, plus more
significant issues like the instability of outline numbering mean Word is a
poor choice for maintaining technical documents. Yet, corporations and
agencies still decide to use it, so we're stuck with it.
I guess Wordies have to fight with numbering issues now and then, yes.
:-) Depending on the needs, many field-based numbering schemes are more
solid and are certainly in use to this day. SEQ anyone?
Using 1 point white text could work technically, but the purpose of all this
is to assist in easy and accurate maintenance of the document. Short leading
would make the embedded marker text nearly impossible to find or edit. I
guess I could write macros to enlarge or shrink the text based on stylename,
but the idea still makes me uncomfortable. Hidden text would have been such
a good solution because you can enable and disable its display quite easily.
And in fact I'd set up the style for these marker paragraphs as having a
colored background shade and a thick border, so its presence on the page was
unmistakable. But, unfortunately, as Susan noted, there appears to be no way
to prevent {STYLEREF} from carrying the hidden attribute along with the
text, so the text can't be invisible in the body but visible in the footer.
Well, since you really have a page-oriented approach, I think it's
easier by _a lot_ if you work with single-page sections. You unlink your
headers and footers and never need bother with STYLEREF. After all,
fields should make our life easier.
2cents
Robert
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