The Windkey and the Lamplighter

The work I’m currently doing is documenting some commercial equipment
so we can purchase it. This requires writing up 5-10 pages of mostly
boilerplate data, filling in information from the vendor datasheets
(when it’s provided) and contacting vendors when it isn’t. Great, not
the best work in the world, but it wasn’t all bad and someone has to
do it. For much of it, that someone wasn’t even me—I occasionally
have lackeys (or electrical engineers) who can help with the research.

The part I haven’t been able to delegate is fixing minor formatting
errors and then turning the documents into PDFs, so they can be
combined with PDF printouts of our Pro/Engineer drawings for
archiving. This part is going to drive me mad.

Before I even get to the meat of my complaining, Pro/E is no picnic
to edit. It’s a big, somewhat unwieldy program, and on my workstation
it is SLOW AS DIRT. I’ve literally started opening a big model, gone
for coffee, and come back to find that it’s not done loading
yet. Furthermore, since the drawings we’re making need to look like
continuation pages of the Word document, every time the Word document
changes in length by a page in either direction you have to renumber
the 1-9 pages of drawing, each individually by hand. (There’s normally
an autonumbering feature, but it doesn’t have a way to specify an offset.)
So formatting issues with Word are particularly annoying.

Word, for all that it is WYSIWYG, doesn’t feel that way when you’re
creating PDF documents. The "autocorrect" feature has an annoying
tendancy to "help" me organize my ordered lists, automatically
formatting them with the appropriate indentations. Great—except
that the format requires that all the sub-categories not be
indended, so then I have to fix the indentations manually. This seems
to happen about every other time I save the document.

I have Adobe Acrobat Professional, so when I create a PDF document, I
have a really convenient-looking button to click to turn my Word
document into a PDF. "Great!", I think, "This will be so much easier
than the PDF printer I had before". Well, yes and no. AAP makes a
PDF by saving the document, closing it, opening it again, printing the
document, closing it again, and then opening it for you to work again.
It does it all automatically—except for the status messages.

A typical PDF generation, then, looks like this:

"The document being saved contains tracked changes. Continue with
save?"

"This document is reserved to prevent accidental editing. Enter
password or choose read only"

"The document being printed contains tracked changes. Continue with
printing?"

prompt for a location to save PDF

"The document being saved contains tracked changes. Continue with
save?"

"This document is reserved to prevent accidental editing. Enter
password or choose read only"

And then I have a PDF, which I can merge with the Pro/E pages.

No wonder everyone hates doing documentation.