Recently at work I put a lot of effort in documenting things. I use my intranet MediaWiki page to keep note of all sort of useful info. Links, snippets of batch files, install processes. Things that one tends to forget and re-use again.
I also got access to a server and installed Wordpress where I keep a very simple blog in (very simple) Japanese.
Wiki’s are great to gather information, but they aren’t very good for diary-like reports and don’t make it easy to leave simple comments. Wordpress is much better, but still sucks because it doesn’t implement comments’ preview !
I also started learning about LaTeX to write simple research reports. I don’t want to sound geeky, but LaTeX seems to make a lot more sense than plainly using Microsoft Word or any other word processor. With LaTeX I can write down text and include images without worrying about layout. With a parameter I can tell it if I want a document to look like a IEEE paper or a Siggraph paper and just recompile it !
Things of course aren’t so smooth. For example today I drew a vector-based image with OpenOffice Draw. OO Draw makes you draw on canvases of printable document size, for example an A4. However one often needs just to save out a portion of the page. For example a graph that needs to go on a sub-figure in the LaTeX paper.
OO Draw allows to save out just a selection, but it does so by including the saved selection in a page sized as the whole document !
It took me a while to find out that this is a known issue that dates back to 2004 ! Luckily someone wrote a macro that can export the selection without the canvas size.. but in the process of discovering all this I felt a bit stupid. Lost in the process of writing something as I’m not even sure about the contents !!
Documenting seems like big waste of time. But this is mostly due to the fact that I have little experience on writing proper reports, however this is the only way I can demonstrate and communicate about my findings, and it’s also a good way to keep a reference of things that one tends to forget.
moomooo !
Posted by Davide Pasca as report writing, LaTeX, OpenOffice at 2:43 AM EST