RE: Re(2): Side-heads in Word?

Subject: RE: Re(2): Side-heads in Word?
From: "Sean Brierley" <sbri -at- haestad -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 13:09:59 -0400


Good points.

But, stuff happens.

Take my last project. A week before my 608-page doc was to go to press,
I was told the page size needed to change--yes, I was less than happy
but the requirement was passed down from above.

Given the workarounds necessary to use and deal with sideheads in
Microsoft Word, I suggest that sideheads are a weakness of this tool and
suggest you redesign your document to accommodate that weakness. Word
has strengths you can play to, so play to those.

This is not a tool issue. It's a workflow issue. If your document design
and workflow requires sideheads, IMHO you are better off using a tool
that accommodates sideheads. If your workflow and tools do not support
sideheads well, I recommend not using them; redesign the doc.

Cheers,

Sean

-----------------------------------------
Sean Brierley
Software Documentation Specialist
Haestad Methods
http://www.haestad.com
203-805-0572 (voice)
203-597-1488 (fax)



-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Margulis [mailto:margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net]

Jan Henning <henning -at- r-l -dot- de> wrote:

>
>What do you do when you need to change the width of the sidehead area?

How would this problem arise? You thought you wanted the sidehead area
to be 1.5 inches, but now you have a sidehead that won't fit nicely into
that space, so you think, hmmm, maybe I should have made it 1.75 inches?
Is that what we're talking about here?

1. This problem should be discovered during the template design stage,
not after you are 150 pages into the document. It is generally poor
practice to make ad hoc adjustments to the template for problems that
arise, regardless of the tool, because this makes a document set much
more difficult to maintain.

2. If you are going to make a global change (to the template and all
documents created from the template), you work within the constraints
the tool imposes on you.

<snip>

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