Re: Electronic editing

[Leslie Bialler lb136@xxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> Turns out they are NOT using out-of-the-box, plain-vanilla Word.
> No, the companies they work for have paid (and paid plenty, I'll wager)
> third parties to create plug-ins, add-ons, templates, and macros to make
> Word a--supposedly--suitable platform for online editing.
>     Now it's true that one needed some tweaking to do this in XyW too. But
> (Leslie will correct me if I have this wrong) that tweaking was done in
> house, by admitedly skillful end-users.

Quite so. In point of fact Word was originally created for people who were once
thought of as members in good standing of "the secretarial pool." And it gave them
(after several iterations) just what they needed--a program that required as much
thought to use as it once did to roll a piece of stationery into an IBM selectric
and then whack away. While XyWrite went after writers and editors, and WordPerfect
after lawyers, Word has stayed true to its original purpose. And so while in the
end the word is Word and the Word is Gates (an entire generation has now grown up
assuming that one should superscript the "st" in 21st century--something that
previously had not been seen since the end of calligraphy), it's still danged
difficult (but far from impossible) to use it for editing.


--
Leslie Bialler, Columbia University Press
lb136@xxxxxxxx
61 W. 62 St, NYC 10023
212-459-0600 X7109 (phone) 212-459-3677 (fax)
> http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup