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Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

Longer term the team should track down where those PDFs are coming from.

"Source --> PDF --> docx --> HTML --> json" is just nuts.

>Coming into the sprint, we understood that one of the major constraints is that the handbook is created and maintained using Microsoft Word.

It's likely that the original source for the PDF/paper copies was lost. This necessitated the process of using OCR to get it into Word.

Obviously maintaining such a large and important piece of documentation in Word is wrong, but that's apparently how it's being done.

What are the options? It should be something that any clerk can handle and that doesn't become obsolete.

"It should be something that any clerk can handle and that doesn't become obsolete."

This is an important statement. in that it is a reasonable goal, but nearly impossible.

Even using word, once one gets past a simple document, and starts having TOC, index, etc. and is "four five-inch binders" full of pages, then not just ANY CLERK will be able to maintain the document.

Sure, maybe not _any_ clerk, but there are certainly more people that have deep knowledge of Word than LaTeX, mediawiki, etc

Okay, invoking Word vs LaTex automatically makes your argument a straw man. I would have compared word to e.g. Adobe InDesign.

It has been my experience that while almost everybody can create a passable document in Word, something technical/government-ish with 500 pages and all of the publishing accouterments that come with a document of size, purpose, and complexity, you're getting into specialist territory, and almost all of the DTP specialists I know start by importing Word files in to InDesign.

How elitist have we become that the top comment says staff will become confused by the term "sprint" or using Microsoft word, the most ubiquitous document writing software in existence. Would I use it? No. Would I suggest it here? Yes. I mean we are talking about PRINTING a 500 page document and carrying it around so we can't reach for the stars here, but I will grant them 2nd grade english and 5th grade typing proficiency.

I think word is actually one of the better tools to do this.

This reads like someone who doesn't have an understanding of the enormous power that word has hiding under it's shell.

Recent versions of Word can also import PDFs, which is useful in a pinch. I think it would have been a good fit for replacing OCR here.

Note that some PDFs contain actual text and markup, and can be imported natively. But others (eg. ones that came from a scanner) are nothing but an image of each page. Such images require some kind of OCR to turn into text, which I doubt Word's built in import will do.

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