Re: Temp/permanent annotations?

Subject: Re: Temp/permanent annotations?
From: Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:33:45 -0800

mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com wrote:

Ok, either everybody does this and there's a selection of apps that I've just overlooked, or nobody does this, and there's good reason why there are no good apps for it... :-)

Um... sometimes I have a bunch of changes to do in Word documents or in a RoboHelp WebHelp project or even FrameMaker docs. So, I'll start. Being the sort of bloke that I am, and having been away from a document/project for the necessary cooling-off period, I begin to find all sorts of stuff that (wasn't part of my initial scope for this edit/re-hash, but) just cries out for re-work.

I (mis)remember Strunk & White saying "Writing is rewriting."
Hocus Pocus had the Top 40 radio jive metal hit "Focus", or maybe it was t'other way around.

Somewhere off of that continuum lie the truely problematic misdirection (like Font Fondling. Hiss. Beware!)

Got your bearings? Then onward!

It's like you were.... oooo! Shiny thing!....
... er, where was I?

Oh, yeah. I'm saying that I can get distracted by stuff that I find and feel the need to tweak, sometimes recursively, across many pages/topics, at the expense of the things I initially went in to update/change. So, I've been known to make two changes on a page and overlook the other two identical items that should have been similarly changed, because I got distracted by some other ugliness I'd perpetrated, or a broken link, or... well...

What I want is to be able to slap on a yellow sticky or equivalent whenever I happen upon something that I should get back to, then continue with what I was _supposed_ to be doing until that's finished.

I would keep a list (technical term). There is nothing since the beginning of the universe that keeps track of things better than a list, as far as I can remember. Print it out, then work down the list, crossing off each item as you complete it. Myself being something of a draft animal, I would use this technique even where I can't script the apps. A few minutes is all the time consumed by 20 or 50 manual copy/paste additions to the list.

I once had a Word macro that would grab a few landmark items from the vicinity of the text I wanted to revisit later--some useful things like the most recent heading text and/or page number, along with something to prompt me back to the immediate vicinity of the text in question (usually just a small tract of highlighted text)--and then paste it at the end of a second open doc. Voila! It is a tracking sheet, it is a CYA insurance policy (if you work in a place with CYA rules), and it isn't really very parasitic on your time or process (but first you must WANT to keep a list).

Good luck getting a budget for it :-)

Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com



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References:
Temp/permanent annotations?: From: mlist

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