[CRISP-TEAM] Alan Barrett's comments on the BW7 draft.

[Bill Woodcock]

>>> I think that the cover letteer should be in a separate document.
>> 
>> I disagree.  I believe that our eventual primary work product should be a single PDF file containing everything in one.  If we split things into separate files, they will inevitably become disassociated in the future.  I don’t think it matters much in the one-week timeframe, but I think this is very important in the two year + timeframe.
> 
> I won't insist on separation, but I do think that two separate documents would make sense.  When I print the proposal, I don't also want to print the cover letter.  When I view the proposal on a web site, I want to see the revision control section at the beginning, not after a cover letter.

Hm.  I agree with your points, but still disagree that they outweigh the interest of posterity in not seeing related documents drift apart and become disassociated.  But this isn’t an issue I care strongly about, so I’d like to see a few other people weigh in with their opinions, so we can make a decision and move forward.

> Most of the content of the cover letter is or could be repeated in the Abstract, if you are concerned about context being lost.

I’d much rather just split into two documents than duplicate.

> I'd put the table of contents after the abstract, but I'll defer to your judgement here too.

You start to get recursion weirdness…  Do things that precede the TOC not appear in the TOC?  Do they appear with negative page numbers?  Does the TOC appear in the TOC?  If so, at page 0?  As soon as you start to venture into wacky territory, you’re outside what software will automatically handle and update through style sheets (or, worse, outside what it will handle reliably), and then the copyediting becomes a whole order of magnitude more important and more difficult.  And we don’t have time for that now, unless it’s a set of manual changes applied at the very end, along with pagination.  And I’d rather not add to the bundle of last-minute changes, since we’ve already condensed what I said would be eight hours of work into four, and that makes me nervous about quality.  I shouldn’t be _just now_ finding whole duplicated paragraphs, as I just did.

                                -Bill




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 841 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <https://www.nro.net/pipermail/crisp/attachments/20150115/ea0652af/signature.asc>