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Make a Word 2013 document awesome like a PDF?
Drake Chambers
Lay out my formal shorts.Registered User regular
Lay out my formal shorts.Registered User regular
I have a team that's been working for an extended period on a large project. It was decided some months back that the deliverables we'd be producing would be PDF documents. Each file consists of an extended narrative with multiple links to supporting documents. In some cases it's important that the link refer to a specific page in a supporting document, and we have the links set up to take you there.
So Adobe is great for that and we're really happy with the result.
Problem is only one member of our team has the Acrobat software and we can't get it for anyone else. As a result, that team member has ended up being a bottleneck in our process that's really slowing things down. Everyone has to send their files to her for editing, combining, and linking and it's taking more time than is practical.
Today I started to wonder if I could basically create a similar document with Word 2013. Before I really dive down that rabbit hole, I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone has any thoughts or tips to that end. If its possible but incredibly cumbersome I might not attempt it.
Any Word masters out there with opinions?
So Adobe is great for that and we're really happy with the result.
Problem is only one member of our team has the Acrobat software and we can't get it for anyone else. As a result, that team member has ended up being a bottleneck in our process that's really slowing things down. Everyone has to send their files to her for editing, combining, and linking and it's taking more time than is practical.
Today I started to wonder if I could basically create a similar document with Word 2013. Before I really dive down that rabbit hole, I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone has any thoughts or tips to that end. If its possible but incredibly cumbersome I might not attempt it.
Any Word masters out there with opinions?
Drake Chambers on
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There are quite a few online editors that allow collaboration. I'm using sharelatex.com for my courses right now and there are others such as overleaf.com and latexbase.com but I haven't used those.
Yeah, you'd think so, right?
Unfortunately, not up to me, or my boss, or his boss... but a committee on the other side of the country that's still "deciding how to move forward" for the rest of the organization.
LaTeX is a high investment, high reward system though. It takes effort to learn how to Latex, but it's so worth it.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Never would have come across it on my own. I love this community.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Because LaTex is originally a typesetting aimed at scientific reports the cross referencing system is far more robust...and noticably less buggy.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Yep. References are as simple as putting a \label{refname} next to thing you want to reference. Then you can link back to that reference with a \ref{refname}. If you want to use custom text for your links, you can \usepackage{hyperref} and build the clickable links with any text you want.
Almost anything that you could think of for latex has been built and is available for use.
In addition, image and table placement is so far above and superior to what Word or other word processors offer it's comical.
Could you write a standard letter in latex? Yeah, but you probably wouldn't.
Could you write an operations manual in Word? Yeah, but you probably shouldn't.
That REALLY depends on which version of LaTex you get. The LaTex user interface is really robust and it's very easy to add specialist functions and custom tools, but basic language for creating LaTex tables is incredibly time consuming. The LaTex manual on table creation is...extensive.
Table generation is the number one cause of wrongly formatted LaTex, but there are a shitload of plugins that can make it faster/easier and then you can fine tune it in LaTeX if you want.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Word definitely has the ability to add hyperlinks to another word document, and you can use bookmarks to link to a specific section of another document. I don’t remember off hand the specific steps but I dont think it was particularly difficult.
If you are trying to convert the linked word documents to PDFs, you will probably still need acrobat to maintain the links though. My guess is it will be very confusing to figure out the first time, but potentially much faster to convert if the original document has all of the links already setup.
Edit -
It will, without a doubt, be less painful than teaching people who are used to word how to use latex. And realistically, probably about as much work as teaching them how to use acrobat. Although word will require more work for you upfront since someone has to figure out how to do it first, where as you already know how to in acrobat.
Professionally, I use Cute PDF Writer to convert to PDF. It's free, but I don't know how it would handle the links, though.
If I were you, I'd be concerned that your boss doesn't have the authority to buy you the basic tools you need to do your job. Might be time to update the old resume.