[Wylug-discuss] October meeting......

[Roger Beaumont]

Rik Wade wrote:
> I work in a small team of people which produces a reasonable quantity  
> of documentation using Microsoft Office applications. The documents  
> generally consist of text with embedded bitmap, Visio and MS Drawing  
> objects. The idea of using LaTeX has been discussed several times,  the 
> main problem being that our "customers" (internal and external to  the 
> company) require MS Word files and not PDF. There is also the  matter of 
> future maintenance of the documentation, which would be  impossible for 
> non-LaTeX users. In practice, it would be easy to  replace the 
> typesetting and document creation side of this work with  LaTeX, just 
> embedding the appropriate objects. Unfortunately, it's  not a practical 
> problem, but an organisational and cultural one.

I used to work for the OU who, for similar "pragmatic" reasons 
standardised on Word.

In practice, whilst most stuff did get through, the exceptions could be 
a nightmare!

First, common to virtually all apps, was the problem of fonts, which are 
almost invariably installed to the OS, not the app.  As overall, mostly 
this didn't remove meaning (though appearance, especially pagination, 
could be grotesquely distorted), but not all fonts contain the same 
character set, so that what appeared on the reader's screen could be 
very different characters than appeared on the writer's screen. 
Actually that problem cropped up much more frequently in the assignment 
documents prepared by the course team than in student submissions - we 
tutors had considerable influence on, if not power over, the students.

The really hellish issue was that different versions of MS Word were not 
properly compatible.  Use the wrong version to load a doc and it could 
be screwed big style!

I'm actually very surprised that you and your customers haven't hit 
these problems (which occur much less often with PDFs).