Can you get Help from a Frame File? (was Re: The Old Argument: Framemaker vs. MS Word)

[Mark Dempsey <mxd2 -at- osi -dot- com>]

May I suggest you take a look at
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/1059/help/templatehelp.htm

This is straight out of FrameMaker (via Webworks), and is a perfectly
nice cross-platform, cross-browser help system. (Yes, there are more
help authoring tools that support Word or RTF.)

As for whether pdfs are a stop-gap... I guess we disagree there too. I
won't argue that most folks use them badly, but we don't. I've had
nothing like the number of complaints about our pdfs that we've fielded
about winhelp. (A secret militia movement is forming as I write to
assassinate the dancing paperclip...8^))

.just wanting to broaden your horizons...

Darren Barefoot wrote:
> 
> Good morning,
> 
> I continue to be frustrated by the presumption that a PDF file is all
one
> requires to be Web-friendly. Like it or not, Acrobat's PDFs are a
stop-gap
> solution that will happily go the way of DOS and GOPHER. The only
feature
> that makes PDFs more Web-enabled than, say, a FrameMaker document is
that
> the reader software is free. Posting a PDF on the Internet is a bit
like
> using a View-Master and calling it a film. The Internet, as we know,
is not
> 8.5" x 11".
> 
> The reality is, if you want to generate a number of digital output
formats
> (HTML, HTMLHelp, WinHelp, PDF, etc.), FrameMaker is not a viable
> alternative. DB.
-- 
Regards,

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-- Mark Dempsey 
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