TechTarget Article: Just Say No to Unnecessary Tabs and Carriage Returns (and Say Yes to Better Interoperability

I've written an article for TechTarget that's not really about using OpenOffice.org per se. It's more about good document construction and formatting. 

The thing is, though, when you do the formatting correctly, lots of nice things happen. The document looks more professional, it's far easier to update, and goes between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org more easily with fewer formatting snafus. And it's not just between those two office suites--better-formatted documents transfer better between different versions of the same office suite, different platforms, and different computers.

It's all about letting the software do a bit of the work, based on what makes sense for it and its environment, rather than laying down the law yourself with manual things like tabs and carriage returns. Instead, you want to just use the formatting capabilities in the program, typically under Format > Paragraph. Doing this, as well as giving your document some wiggle-room and not cramming content into each page, will make a bi-office-suite life go more smoothly.

Separation of format and content. It's not just for XML anymore.

Note: This isn't wildly revolutionary stuff, at least not in the world of publishing and techwriting that I started in 15 years ago. (We had a templates guardian who would threaten to break our knees if we even created an unauthorized style, much less did manual formatting like the stuff described in the article.) But in the--oh, let's say "real world"--where you just sit down at your desk and try to churn out reports for that crazy boss of yours, or when you come from a programming background where vi was your text editor, this could be new and useful info.

The article is based on my experience, as well as what makes sense logically. I've seen a lot of documents that have the manual formatting mentioned in the article, when I go out to train and consult. The first thing I do when I'm looking at a problem document for a client is to choose View > Nonprinting Characters and something manual almost always turns up. There'll be extra tabs, unexpected soft returns, spaces instead of indenting, etc.

I also encounter fewer conversion issues with documents I create, than people in the world at large seem to. I was puzzled by this before I started training, but then realized that it was probably my techwriter/desktop publishing background making the difference.

So--this is just an explanation and an implied caveat. I don't double-dog guarantee that your conversion problems between MS and OpenOffice.org will dribble away to nothing if you format your documents as I recommend. But my experience is that it should help, much of the time.

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Comments

[Erwin]

This normally makes a lot of sense, and indeed using hard returns and tabs to indent text is very ugly.

However, what to do when a paragraph ends up with one or two words at a new line? I tend to
- (if it is a very short word) extend the margin so the one word still fits on the previous line, or
- use a soft return at the end of the last full line so that it becomes a bit shorter and the last line at least has three words.

Needless to say that if a font is replaced as per your example, this will look as ugly as that example.

Any other suggestions? This would need a kind of widow/orphan control on paragraph level instead of page level.

[Solveig]

Hi Erwin,

You're absolutely right. See Format > Paragraph, Text Flow tab for widow/orphan control. As for having a paragraph that has just a word or two on the next line, I personally think the tradeoff in maintenance work versus the minor unattractiveness makes it OK to let this happen and not worry about the soft returns. You might try turning on hyphenation (or off) or messing around with full versus left justification to see if that gives you better results without having to change margins or add soft returns.