In my line of work I sometimes need to write technical or other types of documents. I was once tasked with writing what was essentially an explanation and tutorial on a particular task in a particular embedded system scenario using certain libraries, as I had been working on that and they wanted me to write a clear tutorial and specification of how it was done, for others employees who may need to work on the same or similar things.
The document ended up being, if I remember correctly, about 30 to 40 pages long, and I took particular care to make it as clear and legible as possible, paying special attention to its layout. I added page breaks if needed to make sections, sub-sections, tables, lists and code samples be all contiguous on the same page if needed, or if eg. a code sample was so long that it necessarily needed to be on two pages, I made certain that the page changed at a clear logical place in the code (rather than being, for example, between an "if" line and its body.)
After I was happy with the document I submitted it and reported it done.
The guy in charge of the project then just went ahead and, without asking me, or even telling me anything, selected the entire document and increased the font side by a point or two, apparently because he thought that the default font was too small. I only noticed he had done that because I happened to check the document a day or two afterwards.
And that's literally what he did and nothing else: He selected all the text and increased the font size of everything, and saved. And that's it.
This, of course, broke almost everything. All my work in making the layout of the document as nicely formatted as possible, all to the trashcan in one fell swoop. The guy had not even checked if his change would break anything (or even if he did, he clearly didn't seem to care). At many points longer lines of code became too long and thus wrapped to the next line, causing bits and pieces of code that were originally at the end of lines to be wrapped to the beginning of the next line (without any indentation or anything, of course). A lot of the code samples, tables, lists and even subsections were cut from ugly places, and the explicit page breaks I had added to the original caused some pages to have just a few lines of text at the top and the rest on the next page (ie. the majority of the page was empty), and so on.
And, as mentioned, he didn't even tell me anything. I only noticed because I happened to check the document a couple of days later. I had to then spend an hour or two going meticulously through the document once again and fix all the broken formatting, moving, removing or adding new page breaks, reformatting most code samples and so on.
(Back then I was so new in this company that I didn't really dare to say much about it. However, nowadays I would most definitely send him a strongly-worded email that's only barely short of a "fuck you, go to hell".)
It's not the only example. This is a somewhat lesser and less severe one, but it still shows the same kind of careless cluelessness that so many people seem to have with respect to these things.
In a different project I had written some instructions on how to do a particular thing to update a particular system, and I had written it just as a raw .txt file, primarily intended to be read on screen. If printed, it was about 3 or 4 pages long.
Well, this one guy (again, a project leader/manager) actually wanted it printed so he went and printed it on paper. However, turns out that many of the lines were just a tad bit too long for the printer settings he was using, causing lines to be cut and wrapped around often even mid-word. In other words, the printed version ended up looking like:
Some relatively long line of text containing instructi
ons
on how to do something to update the the system in que
stion
the document being something like 4 pages long.
Well, rather than thinking "oops, this looks like complete ass" and then trying again while scaling the font size down so that it would print correctly, he just accepted it and used that printed version.
This kind of mentality seems awfully common: Complete lack of care about things like document layouts, and just meek acceptance of things like incorrectly printed documents where the end result looks completely horrendous, without even an attempt to try to fix the problem. If some change or bad settings completely breaks the layout of a document, making it look like ass, they don't care. They leave it as it is, or they just accept it and cope with the horrendous end result, without even trying to fix it.
I really can't understand that mentality. I don't think it's just perfectionism to keep things like documents tidy and nicely formatted, so that they look nice and are easy to read and understand. If I were to eg. print a text file and turns out that oops, lines are a bit too long and are being wrapped, I would try to find out if I could scale the text down in such a manner that the printer will not wrap the lines (it helps that operating systems usually have a "preview" functionality so you don't have to actually physically print the thing before you see what it will look line.) I really don't think this is needless perfectionism nor being needlessly picky: I think it only makes sense, and I don't understand people who are so careless about this kind of thing.
Comments
Post a Comment