[pmwiki-users] Page break when printing

[Sandy]

christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, kirpi at kirpi.it wrote:

>> P.S. This thread of mines grew on the attempt to convince my little 
>> cousin to adopt pmwiki (instead of M$Word) for her university papers. 
>> Does anybody have live experience on this? Suggestions, advices, 
>> warnings...?
> 
> I don't think it'd be a good idea - to slow to edit pages that way, and 
> her university will probably have requirements on the formatting.
> 
> /Christian
> 
> 
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Engineering graduate and technical writer here. Lots of writing, solo, 
with groups, and everything in between. Largest project was 500 pages of 
QA documents.

Much as I hate monopolies, I use Word for all but the smallest 
compositions, especially those to be printed. It's designed for it. More 
control over formatting (margins, page numbers), footnotes, and, very 
nice for large documents, the Document Map. I tried OpenOffice (or was 
it StarOffice?) a few years ago for my always-in-progress novel and it 
just didn't work as well.

The goal of a university paper is to get the information into a 
specific, boring, printed format as quickly as possible. The easier the 
brain to paper path is, the better. On a website, you want the 
information to look unique.

It's easier to read and edit wysiwyg than codes. If you get a code 
wrong, you don't know until ten minutes later when you render it; then 
you have to go back to the wiki-text, find the place you messed up, fix 
it, and re-render. Not fun, especially with large documents.

A local copy of Word will be faster and more convenient than accessing 
the internet for it. A local copy of PmWiki means they'd need Apache, 
one more program to keep running, and an unusual one at that; and if 
local, she'd lose the benefits of something sharable.

If it's a shared project, chances are the her coworkers will be editing 
it, and they'll appreciate a program they already know. Add the above 
benefits of wysiwyg.

Notes and research could be either. Wiki's probably the best for sharing 
research and really rough notes, rather than having mulitple copies of a 
Word document going around. Although we managed it ok back in 1990; the 
track revisions, merge/compare documents was useful. I could see using 
PmWiki to upload and organize the documents.

The time she'd spend getting the wiki to jump through hoops it wasn't 
designed for would be better spent elsewhere.

Sigh, I think I may have talked myself out of using the wiki if I ever 
get back into a large printed documentation project. Still like it for 
lots of other things!

Cheers!

Sandy