Software for Authors

Posted by Cassius
May 19, 2011 at 01:04 PM

JohnK wrote:
>The only big mistake I made in this area was trusting single Word files to hold large
>chunks of text (tens of thousands of words). The scars still remain. Don’t do
>it.
> >Using a different Word file for each chapter can make sense, particularly if you
>use a nice organisational tool such as Chapter by Chapter
>(http://sites.google.com/site/sebberthet/chapter-by-chapter).
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I absolutely agree with JohnK on NOT creating long Word documents. Too great a chance that a corruption in one part of the document will corrupt the entire document. This actually happened once when I was at the FAA. An editor who was compiling different sections of a document written in Word by different contributors suddenly found that the entire document was corrupted because corruption in one section had spread to the entire, combined document. She ended up retyping the entire thing.

Another danger is emailing a Word document as an attachment. I once emailed a Word document to an editor two floors up. Usually, she made no changes, but this time she emailed it back with numerous changes. I asked her why and she said she hadn’t made any changes. The email did!!! I had to reread the entire document and fix all of the changes (corruptions) as there was no pattern to them. Thereafter, I hand-carried each chapter to her on a floppy.

Even when I completed a large technical report, I never put it in one file. I printed each chapter separately. (This was before our print shop had the capability to print directly from an electronic file.) I ALWAYS kept one or more “pristine” backups of each chapter, just in case of a disaster.

-cassius