At a time when I'm about ready to go flip burgers rather than endure another week here at $job, I've been given two technical writing assignments in quick succession. It's as though my employer suddenly realized the skill that caused them to hire me in the first place, and want to have me do something I'm actually good at!
It's like a breath of fresh air. I'm actually enjoying myself.
Yeah, I'm one of those strange people that actually enjoys writing technical documentation, and writing "white paper" sort of documents aimed at non-technical people, and, I guess, just writing in general. I think I could happily spend the entire day doing nothing but that.
My only frustration at the moment, in fact, is that I'm compelled to use inferior tools for the job.
I really can't imagine writing structured documents in Word. How do people do it? I mean, obviously, Word does a lot of things that I don't know about. But the simple task of writing a structured document, with internal references (see section 12.4) and auto-indexing (TOC as well as a glossary/index at the end) is way beyond my ability. I would have thought that this sort of thing would be really easy. And I expect it probably is, and I just don't know how. But what point-click-drag-and-drool method could be easier than just typing \index{GUI indexing tools} at the point in the text that I want the index to point to?
The amusing thing about this kind of rant is that it elicits exactly two kinds of responses. Either people immediately see my point and agree, or they have no idea what I could possibly be referring to. The latter group tend to be the "well, of course everyone uses Word, silly" group who can't imagine that there are other ways to do it. (And, although that sounds derogatory, I'm sure that many of these people can produce as-good or better docments using that tool.) The former group, alas, commiserate, but don't really have a functional solution to offer. Which is very unfortunate.
The whole conversation is here.
It's been quite a while since I've done much in Word, but TOCs and Indexes were fairly easy to create. The trick for creating TOCs is to use Word's built-in Heading # styles for your document headings. Then all you need to do is click where you want the TOC and do Insert->Index and Tables and then choose the appropriate options. If you ever need to update the TOC, just right click it and choose update entire table.
Indexes are similar. First you need to mark the items you want in the index. To mark the items it seems like you select the text and then mark the index entry (Alt+Shift+X seems the quick keyboard shortcut). Once you have index items marked, create an index in much the same way as the TOC.
Hope this helps. It really depends on what tool you're familiar with.
Posted by: Tim Powell on April 14, 2004 02:29 PMBoth index and TOC in Word are based on the misty concept of Field Codes. These update automatically when you print the document, perhaps even when you save the document, and you can manually update them by selecting the field (the gray area that is your TOC etc.) and hitting (IIRC) F9.
My chief gripe against Word as a tool for structured documents is how it mixes content and presentation. Especially when your documents get large, it's impossible to make any changes without the dreaded "If I do this, will I lose all my work" thought in the back of your head. All IMHO of course.
Posted by: Sander on April 14, 2004 05:24 PM