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That’s exactly the sort of use case we are focussing on and building our automated typesetting service for.¹ You’ll probably also benefit from file inclusions s
by rhythmvs 11y ago
That’s exactly the sort of use case we are focussing on and building our automated typesetting service for.¹ You’ll probably also benefit from file inclusions so that you can keep a library of text snippets, with variables, keeping them versioned separately, and which you can then re-use and assemble to form a new, slightly different manual, with the variables automatically populated at typesetting time.
Could you be more specific on the problem you’re facing with placing images? Is it that there are like hundreds of them, for which you would want to have created the references (and ) automatically, because typing out the file paths manually is too tedious? That is doable, although it would be more of a drag-and-drop feature to be implemented by a dedicated Markdown editor, or an ST plugin.
Or would you like to have more fine-grained control over floats, sizing and placement of the images relative to their place in the text narrative? For which a WYSIWYG interface is indeed more well suited, re: many document author’s gripe with TeX’s figure placement.
¹ http://textus.io/ http://textus.io/
- rubidium 11y agoGlad to hear it. Here's some bullet point thoughts: 1) Workflow needs to be uber-fast and not require saving/naming the images (at least at the user level, the program will of course). Many images are screen shots from SW installs. Workflow goes: Run SW in VM-> screenshot portion of interest -> Copy+Paste into word doc. I never even save the image in that case. The rest of the images are photos of HW. I just want to drag and drop into the document, not rename them all and move them to a same folder with the document. The document/CMS/program should take care of that all for me (like Word does). 2) I do need the text and images to match better and be more WYSIWYG. Location is more important than aesthetics for a guide. It cannot be the abomination that LaTeX is. LaTeX figures are terrible to work with (and that's having published multiple academic papers + PhD thesis in LaTeX). Sizing is less important (that can be [width=x, height=y]). 3) Variables/snippets: Libraries of text snippets and variables is what we do quite a bit of. Right now with a few kludged together macros and custom Word doc properties. Lots of docs go "Run the <SW install name> for <device>" with <> items defined at document level. Sounds like you do this, and it's probably better than how word does :) sorry for dumping on ya, but I'm excited to find people working in this space. It's something I feel like there should be better tools for but just haven't found yet.
- brazzledazzle 11y agoYou might be interested in Problem Steps Recorder[0]. Word should be able to import the resulting mhtml file. [0] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patricka/archive/2010/01/04/using-the-secret-windows-7-problem-step-recorder-to-create-step-by-step-screenshot-documents.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patricka/archive/2010/01/04/using-th...