Future documentation methods

Coming towards the end of the first year of my PhD and spending some time writing up my progress so far has led me to muse over the nature of report writing and ask the question: "surely there must be something better"...

Whilst the old adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it" might well apply here, I can't help but think that in the 21st century of immersive 3D virtual reality game playing, home 3D printing, and everyone carrying at least one state of the art electronic device about their person at all times, the concept of a paper report seems a little dated.

Here are a few examples to try to illustrate my point:

• If there is a book and a film of the same story (or even a webpage and a youtube video) I will inevitably look at the the film first as it will convey the information to me far faster, and with less effort than reading the book.
• If I have a choice between a photo or drawing of an object and a 3D model (either manipulable on screen or available to touch) I would get a better understanding of it from the 3D.
• If I want information on a specific subject then I turn to Google/Wikipedia before I head off to the library.

I don't think these are examples of me being weird, they are simply illustrations of modern life making information more readily accessible. I'm sure you could argue over semantics ("the book contains more detail than the film", "library books have a more systematic review process than google hits", etc) but I hope you can accept my general point.

It therefore seems strange to me that a piece of work, perhaps costing thousands of pounds and many hundreds of man hours, should be presented in such a one dimensional format as a printed report. Here is a summary of what I see as the limitations to a printed report:

1. One dimensionality - sure pictures might take this up to 2D, but all too often there aren't enough of these!
2. Lack of user interaction - I can't search for a keyword, interactively link to source, or request further detail on a topic.
3. Page constrained format - diagrams need to fit within a certain width, zooming in is limited by your eyes and printer resolution and page breaks artificially chop things up.
4. Visual sense only - My other senses are put on hold, and only serve as a distraction.

So what have people done to improve on this? Here're a few examples that I can think of:

• Video - a good recent example is this guys youtube CV
• Hyperlinking - within sections of a document or out to other documents or web sites
• Wiki formats - taking linking between sections to the extreme and making progress through the information less linear
• 3D graphics - starting to be seen more in web pages, an excellent example is Google body
• Powerpoint - a format often used in place of a standard document, it has many of the same issues, however users often seem to feel a little less constrained in terms of layout (perhaps this is only due to convention?)
• Computable document format - this is a really exciting new development that reflects a lot of what I'm describing here

This last concept may or may not take off but I can see what they are hoping it will achieve. Some of its functionality can already be achieved in a pdf (details of how to achieve a lot of them through LaTeX are here) and almost all of it could also be done through HTML and javascript. An interesting discussion on this is given here. In fact the recently developed HTML5, in combination with javascript programming, offers a whole mass of interesting possibilities for the presentation of information. A step towards using HTML5 for what I'm talking about here is Tangle. This is a javascript library that supports the production of "reactive documents", allowing a reader to play with the content of the document.

Another alternative format with a lot of capability is Flash animation, these animations are typically web-based and often allow user interaction. Some basic options for creating these are given here. Although it is a very widely used format it requires a good level of experience to be able to code it. It has also faced quite widespread criticism recently, the most high profile of which came from Apple, and therefore there is speculation about whether HTML5 will ultimately replace it.

An obvious downside to these types of advanced documentation method is the length of time it takes to actually produce a document. Even when the author has a good knowledge of the specific tool they're using I think it's safe to say that nothing I've mentioned above will be as quick to produce as a simple text document. In fact the more advanced the documentation method - the longer it's likely to take to produce.

I'd love to be able to round off with a recommendation of the ultimate tool or combination of tools that can be used to create the perfect document, but as far as I've seen it doesn't yet exist. Lots of things seem to offer at least part of the solution I'm looking for, but none pull it all together into one great package. So instead I'll do two things, firstly I'll make a few plain points in summary/prediction, then I'll put together a set of use cases that I'd like to see available to the end user of my "ultimate document".

Summary/Predictions

• The plain printed word document is currently in the process of being overtaken by more electronic forms of documentation, inherently bringing a lot more potential to the document itself (hyperlinking and embedded video being two major ones). I would expect this to be a continuing trend (that may eventually even reach formal engineering reporting or even academia!).
• There is the potential for this to go a lot further than the type of electronic documents seen today with the addition of 3D effects, audio tracks and similar.
• HTML5 currently seems to offer the most potential for supporting this type of advanced documentation (although the computable document format may also be a candidate if it manages to pickup much of a user base).
• Very little progress towards this end goal will be achieved until there are good tools for authoring the type of document I'm discussing here.
• It seems highly likely that viewing of any document of this type will be through a web browser or similar.

Use cases - scenarios that I, as an end 'reader', would like to see supported in this ultimate document format.

1. User managed detail level - I'd like to be able to look in more detail at sections I'm interested in or know little about, whilst invisibly skipping over the mundane or tedious stuff.
2. Unconstrained document flow - If I want to read summary, then the contents, then the conclusions, then methods, it should be easy for me to work through that way.
3. Recommended document flow - If I simply want to be guided through the document ensuring that I pick up all the important information then this should also be easy
4. User interaction - Where more information could be made available then I should be able to access it. For example I should be able to zoom in on a waveform or rotate a 3D model.
5. Multiple sense stimulation - practically this is likely to be limited to visual and audio currently (at least until we develop smell-o-vision and feel-o-vision...)
6. Portability - I want this document to be viewable in as many places as possible, consequently it must be compact and easily openable on a variety of devices (laptops, mobiles, touchpads, e-readers, etc). This might even extend to alternative language/disability support and (somewhat ironically) the ability to print onto plain old paper.

So what have I missed? I'd love to discuss this topic and related areas more so please leave me a comment.
I'd also love to have the time, skills and supervisor buy-in to trying to present my thesis in the manner I've outlined; however I suspect that that will remain a pipe-dream...

Selecting the correct format

Does format matter?

Today I received an invite to a party in ".doc" format (i.e. a Microsoft Word document) via email. Whilst I was happy to be invited to the party, and the invite very much served its purpose, I can't help thinking that it could have been presented better. Here're some comments I would make:

1. ".doc" is a proprietary format, which although popular and therefore supported on most peoples computers, can lead to inconsistent formatting or in the worst case a user not being able to open it at all.
2. It is also what I would consider to be an "editing format", which means it is fine for producing a document, or passing over to someone else for meddling with, but not (in my opinion) for presenting to a recipient. This is for several reasons:
1. The possibility of the user accidentally editing the document. Say for example the last thing the sender changes is the date of the party "3/6/2011" - it would be all to easy for me to open the document and then accidentally nudge the zero key, only to turn up to a distinct lack of party on "30/06/11".
2. Access to details the sender didn't wish to share. Formats such as this provide for a great deal of version history to be saved with the document; so unless specific steps are taken to ensure that this is not included in what I receive, there is every chance that I would be able to view previous versions of it, or comments about its contents.
3. It does not necessarily open in an easy to view format - either on the wrong page, or at the wrong zoom level, or with certain formatting visible (for example a nice red line under all the spelling mistakes). Microsoft did try to improve on this with the introduction of their "reading view" in Word 2003; however I don't think this really helped and only served to confuse the majority of users.
4. Because of all the extra information the format contains, often the files are far, far larger than they need to be.
3. It was sent attached to an email. Email is already a perfectly good format for presenting information, with a variety of different effects available (providing html format is used), so it seems a little unnecessary to attach a file with the information in.

How about an Analogy?

To make the closest analogy possible - if this were an invitation sent by good old-fashioned snail mail, it would be:

• a handwritten letter;
• with all the comments and corrections scribbled in the margins;
• with some spelling and grammatical mistakes highlighted but not corrected;
• spread over multiple pages - but folded open somewhere in the middle of the document;
• posted in a large, heavy and cumbersome box which some recipients lack the tools or knowledge to open;
• that is itself housed within a larger box.

Now that is maybe a worst-case scenario, but not particularly exaggerated in my experience; and whilst you might be a bit surprised to receive that as a party invite, you would be pretty disgusted to receive it as a Masters level degree thesis submission. And even more appalled if it was presented as a final report for a multi-thousand pound project contract! Yet this is exactly the sort of thing the gets done in Word every day. That's not to say a lot of those issues don't crop up in the use of other programs; however Word seems to be the most common object of misuse.

So what's the alternative?

A lot of the fuss I've made above can be avoided through proper use of the Microsoft tools. Provided you remove any hidden data, properly spell check your work and set the display up before you finally save it then things should come out looking ok. You can even protect the document to avoid accidental editing. However, to completely negate these issues, I prefer to use a totally separate "display format" for presenting information.

For anything that is disseminated wider than myself (or my immediate team) I am very keen on the use of common, open standards. The most common of which I have found to be pdf. Most people have a pdf reader installed on their computer, no matter what their operating system. In fact most modern phones can display pdf files. Many programs are able to save to pdf as built in feature and those that can't are invariably able to print to one of the many pdf conversion programs available.

There are also some very neat features of pdf files that are not often exploited, but can be used to produce some very useful effects. e.g. opening by default in full screen mode, embedding other files within them, etc. (perhaps I'll cover this at a later date)

By far my most important reason for trying to use pdf format for dissemination though is that it is a format that is difficult to edit (granted editors do exist, but 'accidental editing' is almost impossible) . This means that if I send a file to someone, and they choose to send it to someone else, I can be fairly confident that the final recipient will see what I want them to see (and nothing else!).