Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).
Why don’t you just ctrl+f in a word doc/PDF? That’s still possible, but it’s not exactly of much help in many cases. E.g. if the headline you are looking for is the name of a basic concept that appears all over in the document. Page 512 only appears once.
All other forms of indexing are content-dependant. Indexing by page works the same on any page-based document.
You can of course, but I was specifically pointing out how slow word is when doing any search query.
Page 512 or line 10054, more or less the same thing right?
Didn’t think about duplicate header names, in those cases I guess you would need to be given a line number to go to if someone’s sharing a section for you to see.
I don’t use word collaboratively that heavily so maybe people telling you to “see page 512” is common and I can see how saying “go to line 100512” is harder. I’m sure nothing would stop editors from introducing a feature for fake page numbers.
There will always be certain drawbacks though, most may be fixed by editors having nice UX, others maybe not.
A good example for what I mean with the header names is e.g. the datasheet of a microcontroller. For e.g. the Atmega328p, that’s a PDF with a few hundred pages.
If you search for a section explaining a feature, and you CTRL+F for the name of the feature, which is the headline of the corresponding section, you will get matches for the same exact string of characters all over the document: first in the feature list in the beginning of the document, then on the pinout, then in the text of any other feature that references the feature you are looking for, then in the appendices and lastly in the glossary. Somewhere in the middle of these potentially 100s of matches will be the correct one.
After a while of using that document, you will have the most important page numbers memorized.
Why don’t you just ctrl+f in a word doc/PDF? That’s still possible, but it’s not exactly of much help in many cases. E.g. if the headline you are looking for is the name of a basic concept that appears all over in the document. Page 512 only appears once.
All other forms of indexing are content-dependant. Indexing by page works the same on any page-based document.
You can of course, but I was specifically pointing out how slow word is when doing any search query.
Page 512 or line 10054, more or less the same thing right?
Didn’t think about duplicate header names, in those cases I guess you would need to be given a line number to go to if someone’s sharing a section for you to see.
I don’t use word collaboratively that heavily so maybe people telling you to “see page 512” is common and I can see how saying “go to line 100512” is harder. I’m sure nothing would stop editors from introducing a feature for fake page numbers.
There will always be certain drawbacks though, most may be fixed by editors having nice UX, others maybe not.
A good example for what I mean with the header names is e.g. the datasheet of a microcontroller. For e.g. the Atmega328p, that’s a PDF with a few hundred pages.
If you search for a section explaining a feature, and you CTRL+F for the name of the feature, which is the headline of the corresponding section, you will get matches for the same exact string of characters all over the document: first in the feature list in the beginning of the document, then on the pinout, then in the text of any other feature that references the feature you are looking for, then in the appendices and lastly in the glossary. Somewhere in the middle of these potentially 100s of matches will be the correct one.
After a while of using that document, you will have the most important page numbers memorized.