Part Two – Don’t Panic

Working professionally designing documentation and other technical material for publication, I use Adobe Framemaker which was a block editor for authors, especially technical authors. It enabled you to track indexed and glossary items across chapters AND across books and to place graphics exactly where you wanted them and not (as in MSWord) have them roam freely. I had my own copy and used it when I wrote a book. It enabled designing left, right, and front pages, gutters, page numbering (left, right, center), and using any number of appendices, glossaries, all linked to chapters and books. It was a real book editor and for what I did, it was a great (if extremely complicated) tool.

I don’t need that anymore. It was life or death in the professional world, but now it’s just extra work. I would have loved to see better, more precise adjustments to type and text, but instead, we now have a choice of tiny (unreadable), small (barely readable) medium (can be any size depending on the font), huge (ugly). Boy oh boy do I miss being able to select the size of the type by points or pixels rather than the meaningless sizes you’ve put in place. I had hoped to see frames for pictures so you could place them where you wanted them and have them stay put. Fewer typographical glitches would be gratefully received.

But blocks? For a non-genre blog? Sort of like using a helicopter to go to the grocery store.

There are so many text/font/spacing problems already, you have now created yet another version of the format without fixing the previous errors. Messy. You need people to beta and alpha test your software — preferably WRITERS AND ARTISTS WHO REALLY USE THE FORMAT — before publishing it.

I remember the year you decided we didn’t need an edit button because who would want to edit a post after writing it? Taking away the spell-checker — actually useful — and unlike the external ones, it worked. Grammarly sometimes works, then sometimes decides you have to pay them, but it does successfully block the Chrome spellchecker (which isn’t very good anyway).

The biggest frustration is that you don’t test your software and have “happiness engineers” who tell me that I don’t write well enough and that’s why all my posts are missing from the database.

My ability to write has nothing to do with placement in a database and your engineers wouldn’t have anything in their background which gives them the right to judge a writer’s work. And having to hunt down what might have been the ONLY engineer who understood what I meant by a “database” took WEEKS.
All the engineers who never checked the database to see if it was corrupted (it was ). I spent YEARS designing and documenting databases. it was insanely frustrating.

Now, I can’t even try the new format without getting locked into it. I might like it, though I’m not optimistic, but if you force me to try it without leaving me the option to decide to NOT use it? Seriously? Would you buy into that?

Maybe Microsoft can get away with this, but you can’t. Most of us are doing this as a hobby. We aren’t working anymore. We don’t need a long learning curve. We just want to be able to write a piece, pop in a few pictures, and move along. Maybe your business clients like the block format, although honestly, I think it’s too complicated for any blog, even business.

Why not fix the classic editor so that people who understand type sizes can adjust to what they REALLY want and fix all the spacing glitches that have been around for at least all of the 8 years I’ve been blogging. THAT would be a huge help. You need to fix OLD errors before you pile on new software. You need engineers who know what a database IS and know the difference between authorship and software glitches. Most of the people I’ve talked to don’t know a database from their elbow.

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I actually thought you weren’t going to trap me into the block format again. But you did it again. I hate it, nothing looks the way it ought to. The fonts are HUGE and there’s no way to control them and I can’t see what it will look like. Please release me from this format because I hate it. Really HATE it.

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