[DFDL-WG] MS Word Limitations for DFDL Spec Review

[Mike Beckerle]

Two topics:

* change tracking
* hyperlinks

So...

Change Tracking:

I have reached the limits of MS-Word with change tracking in this roughly
250 page DFDL spec document.

I believe at this point I am going to have to give up on change tracking,
I.e., providing drafts with accumulated changes since a prior major version
marked with change bars.
I have found that a PDF export from MS Word with tracked changes even with
only "simple markup" is quite illegible, with heading numbers appearing not
on the same line even as their heading, etc.  I believe this is an
interaction of renumbering of sections and change tracking. Either way, MS
Word crashes often and I am worried about losing work or corrupting the
document. I found already that in revision r22, a cross-reference to the
section about recoverable errors was not putting in a cross reference to
that section, but rather was repeating the entire contents of the section
at each point of cross reference. I had to hand delete all of these as I
encountered them when going through the reviewer comments page by page.

I think at this point we're forced to greatly reduce use of MS-Word change
tracking, and if a reader wants to study the changes between two revisions,
they have to fire up MS-Word, and use it to compare two working draft
versions of the document.

So the version I am going to push up for consideration soon (which is
probably r27 or r28) will have change tracking, and also I will create a
version with all changes accepted. Further changes will happen in the one
with all (current) changes accepted, creating a new, smaller set of
changes, not an accumulated set of all changes since the prior official
draft. In addition, for various large changes like section moves, I plan to
accept them, and just add a comment bubble to remind reviewers to read the
section, as having the whole change visible with strikethrough of the
deleted and colored/underlined text for the insertions ruins the flow of
the document.

The only reliable viewer for the document, which can show the tracked
changes in "simple markup" so that you see change bars on sides of pages
only, is MS Word itself. Creating a PDF with "simple markup" doesn't work
right.

Hyperlinks:

I have determined that MS-Word cross references are simply NOT converted
into navigable hyperlinks when the document is output as an HTML document.
This appears to be simply a MS-Word limitation. The same limitation exists
in OpenOffice. A PDF gets navigable hyperlinks, but not an HTML output.
Furthermore, I have determined that an MS-Word Index results in a printable
index, but again there are no navigable links from the index to the
referenced pages/locations.

Based on this I am going to abandon, for now, creating a easily/readily
used HTML version of the spec., and stick with just PDF.


Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Owl Cyber Defense |
www.owlcyberdefense.com
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