A Few Thoughts…

I’ve ranted on this before, and I probably will again in the future. Word is a fine tool for writing short papers – but in the technical writing world, it’s only barely adequate. It can get the job done – not easily or conveniently though. Several of my co-workers would be in favor of doing documentation in Latex, but many (including those in charge) are not.

The documentation process would be much easier (SCM tools can easily handle text files – go figure) and it would be much easier to maintain formatting across multiple writers/editors. In general I think those writing the docs would be more productive because they can sped time writing the content instead of worrying about the formatting. Just because the ‘World runs on Windows’ and by extension ‘Writes with Word’ doesn’t mean it’s the best answer for a task – merely the most convenient. People spend a lot of time learning new languages and new techniques to be able to solve problems better, and then fall back to what is most convenient method of documentation. Scratch that – Word isn’t even the most convenient, it’s just the most pervasive in the office environment.*

If you have a little while, do yourself a favor – learn Latex! There is a little bit of a learning curve, but you can very quickly become proficient at writing documents which are easy to maintain, and look more professional than 99%** of the documents written in Word.

* Excel is still awesome, and the best tool for the job in many cases*
** 78% of statistics are made up – though this does not indicate that my estimate is wrong!
*** Footnotes are also a LOT easier in Latex…