Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You don't know the requirements of documentation that we're writing. They don't need a table of contents. They don't need an index. They don't need citations. They don't need math symbols. They don't need tables more complex than a word processor can create. We require no features which your typical academic or research paper requires. We are documenting processes with screenshots that users can refer to in order to accomplish specific tasks. Only a dozen of them are more than 25 pages, and in Word if you keep your document formatting simple and use the built-in styles for headings, the Navigation Pane serves as a hyperlinked ToC. None of these documents should be printed because the processes can change, so beyond basic structure, layout isn't particularly important.

Furthermore, our documents can't be written in LaTeX because half the people responsible for maintaining them come from a non-technical background with no experience in programming. No, we are not going to inflict a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor -- all of which are far less usable than Word -- on people just because some technical people want to pretend they're programming.

Nevertheless, our CS interns invariably say, "Why don't we use LaTeX for this documentation?" I understand why they want to. They use LaTeX for all their papers. However, it is inappropriate in our situation and has gotten to be a rather irritating question.



> You don't know the requirements of documentation that we're writing

Yet you seem happy to prescribe your (extremely limited) views on everyone else without knowing their situation.

Good for you if all your documentation requirements are trivial, and I'm sorry to hear that your team cannot cope with trivial software installs or simple markup. Maybe the problems lie not with LaTeX...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: