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Ask HN: What do you think about this idea?

4 pointsgraham17762 comments

What do you think about a CMS+Theme designer that compiles to Microsoft Word?

I write 100's of pages of business documents per year in Microsoft Word for my business.

My pain point is threefold:

A) Managing versions

B) Formatting to company guidelines

C) Keeping content separate from formatting

D) Managing comments

I have an idea for a document authoring tool that combines my favorite non-coder sites' functionality to solve these problems.

A) Use the Squarespace Content Manager to organize sections of a document, with ability to input text, table, and image blocks.

B) Use the Svbtle dashboard to organize documents and their contents (think file manager with TOC tree nested beneath each)

C) Use the commenting system from Medium for comments

D) Theme picker to format content from A)(ideas?)

Use all of that to export to a Word Document that has my formatted, designy content where I can make final adjustments to the document. Has it been done? What are pitfalls? Why do we use Word to write content and format documents when it is bad at both?

Word uses an open XML format now. You can certainly accomplish this.

Having used Microsoft Word since Word 2.0 (and WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS for good measure), I am not sure I agree that it's bad at managing content and formatting if the user fully understands how its layout engine works. It has useful multi-author collaboration features, especially as of 2013.

Word's power gets unlocked once the user fully understands its styling and themes system. Reformatting a document to company guidelines becomes painless if every element is associated with the correct style. It is similar to CSS.

The value of rendering to Word escapes me. I would render to an HTML5 document and then to PDF.

Thanks for the feedback.

Interesting thoughts on the layout engine and comparison to CSS, I hadn't thought of that before. I think a lot of the discussion around excel (ie data vs models vs formatting) applies here too, in that while it isn't ideal architecture separating content from styling, in the end it is certainly easier.

Interesting point on 2013 too, we are currently using 2010 and I think it may be giving me bias.

The thought on rendering back to Word was to acknowledge that certain things still need to be tweaked and changed to arrive at a final product. I agree that it would be easier and probably more forward thinking to got the HTML->PDF route, but I am thinking of the masses here, where a computer illiterate person can pick up a generated document and then go from there. Interesting thoughts and thanks for the feedback

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