Winship wrote:
>
> On Thu, 29 Oct 1998, Rich Greenberg wrote:
> > } 1.  Prepare and release everything in plain lower order ascii FIRST,
> > }     then convert it to word, wordperfect, etc.
> > Having done a fair bit of documentation, what you are asking here is
> > just not practical.  Importing an ascii text file into Word or WP and
> > then adding all the formatting is just not practical for anything much
> > larger than a few pages.  Its much easier to do it in word as you go
> > along and then save as ascii text.
>
> Except "save as ascii" does not work.  If I had a dime for every artifact
> left in a document done on a word processor and "saved as ascii," which
> I have subsequently had to find and delete to get that blasted thing to
> work I would be very wealthy.
>
> I have seen no instances, yet, where "save as ascii" really and truly
> "saves as ascii."  One can format quite nicely in plain ascii, all
> the rest is nothing but glitz.

I have to agree with Rich here.  In the case of
documentation, this "glitz" is
probably the most important part.  Facts are fine, but if I
can't find them
or read them, then they are worthless.  The first
requirement of documentation
(after correct facts) is readability.  Nice formatting,
proportional fonts, etc.
make it usable.  It's a whole lot easier to create the
document in a wordprocessor
and later export as ascii and manually clean up the ascii
for online use than it
is to create as an asicc file and then import into the word
processor and put in
all the formatting.  Also, most modern word processors will
also let me save the
document as html in addition to ascii, so I can produce all
three formats easily.

If you're really into this sort of stuff, probably the best
solution (but not the
easiest) is to format the document using TEX or LaTEX.

Harold