3 ms·

Ewwww. I woulda cobbled something together to suck the text out of them.

• pacaro 9y ago
  Hahaha, me too, but the old Word format really is as bad as everyone says, and we were trying to build a system with formal correspondence from spec to code (and sometimes from spec to proof to code), so having a "cobbled" together something really didn't fit the model. The real problem was using word as our documentation format, but at Microsoft in the early oughts there really weren't many alternatives.
  • wglb 9y ago
    Well, I do believe LaTeX was available. The cobble-together part, to be successful, would pull the text out reliably. And the format is readily documented, and Open/Libre office processes it as well. The code to do the extract might be ugly, but so long as it reliably produced the text in a CI/CD environment, that would be OK.
    • pacaro 9y ago
      The constraints were entirely organizational, many better technical solutions were suggested