Re: Edit a ConTeXt generated document with Adobe Acrobat Professional

[Andreas Schneider <aksdb@gmx.de>]

At Friday, 15.07.2011 on 10:17 Cecil Westerhof wrote:
> Properly that anybody that knows how to write a document in Microsoft Office
> can change the document. So standard software, with a low learning curve. I
> had some problems getting them to accept to use Adobe. And now that turns
> out to be not a real option. Learning all the time as Benny Hill said.

That's absolutely not true. MS Office Word has a pretty steep learning curve, people just neglect that and take it for a slightly more complex notepad. It's not, as can be seen be the loads of completely unprofessional done documents ... not consistent styles, no auto generated index, no cross references, no proper bibliography (where it applies), etc. (Hell, I even saw documents where footnotes where done [superscript] and numbered manually.)
That's exactly the problem with Word, Writer, etc., that people think it's an easy to use tool, just because it's WYSIWYG. If you don't know what you are doing, you WILL do it wrong, even (or especially) with such an "easy" tool as Word or Writer.

In contrast a tool like ConTeXt forces you to learn and therefore makes it a lot harder to f*ck up a document. I also did our technical documentation in ConTeXt, after porting it over from Word. My colleagues didn't know *TeX and still manage to change and enhance the document as needed. I provided the necessary platform (project structure, lua scripts etc.) so the document itself is only a frontend using easy-to-comprehend commands. I also built an installer that installs a specific ConTeXt Minimals version, the necessary modules, and a preconfigured TeXworks, so they don't even have to setup that or play around with proxy settings for firstsetup.bat.

Also with TeXworks it's already pretty WYSIWYG, imho. Change the code, hit "run", and see the result :)

> No the problem is not the layout. They are satisfied with that. They just do
> not want to be dependent on our company.

They don't have to. Give them ConTeXt, give them TeXworks, give them the source to the documents. Then they can do whatever they want.

> That is what I mend that in hindsight I should not have used ConTeXt. ;-}

Maybe, but if the customer/client didn't specify in advance, that they want it done in Word, how could you know? If you used Indesign or something else they would be f*cked too - because these tools are simply not meant to be used without learning first. (Although, as said earlier, Word and similar tools aren't meant to be used without learning too ... many people just think it is.)


Best Regards,
Andreas.
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