Converting paper documentation to Web format?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Julie Johnston works for a company <<... that produces a large volume of
documentation in paper format.  One of our future plans is to post the
documentation on the web.>>

Before you can determine what the best solution is, you need to carefully
understand what you're trying to accomplish and how this relates to the
needs of those who will visit your site. (You didn't mention whether you
want to distribute printable documents, or make information available for
easy access online, or some combination of both. Each problem would have a
different solution.) The only really good way to preserve complex formatting
is PDF; HTML lacks professional formatting tools, though you can fake a
reasonably complex layout using tables, frames, and the like.
Simplistically, you have two choices: if format and the ability to print
paper copies is important, choose PDF; if format is largely irrelevant and
the goal is online browsing, use HTML. (The real situation is a bit more
complex than that, but as a starting point for discussion, that simplistic
view is fairly accurate.)

<<I've tried to convert the docs from Word to FrontPage, but I end up losing
some of the formatting.>>

Part of the problem is that Word generates execrable HTML code. That's
compounded by the fact that FrontPage shares this drawback. You're better to
save the file as text and open it in your favorite HTML authoring tool and
rebuild the formatting from scratch. Dreamweaver 3 has a new tool designed
specifically for cleaning up Word HTML, and that might be a good investment;
even if you don't create the final pages in Dreamweaver, you can at least
use it as a cleanup tool. But in any case, you're still going to lose any
formatting information beyond basic typography (e.g., HTML doesn't support
two columns without using tables and has no really useful typographic
controls for line spacing and character spacing). There are a variety of
related problems that you have to resolve _before_ you convert a file into
HTML; for example, convert two-column layouts into single-column layouts,
and replace your graphics with Web-friendly formats (e.g., JPG or GIF rather
than .tif, PNG rather than EPS).

<<Since there is such a large volume of documentation, it would be very time
consuming to convert all the documentation manually over to web format.>>

HTMLTransit gets excellent reviews as a tool for converting formatted
wordpro files into decent HTML, but I haven't tried it myself and have vague
memories of them recently pricing themselves out of the market. (Maybe one
of the executives at Blue Sky Software jumped ship to work there? <g>) But
the crux of the problem is that you're still not going to have an easy time
converting a format designed for print into one designed for online viewing.
One thing you'll have to do in the long term is to develop a design strategy
that facilitates this task (i.e., redesign the current documents so they're
easier to convert), but in the short term, you'll have to decide whether PDF
or HTML comes closest to doing what you want it to do. PDF is by far the
simplest solution right now, since all you do is select "Print" and let the
software produce a perfectly formatted PDF for you. There are also various
Acrobat settings that can minimize (but not eliminate) the problem of large
file sizes. One thing you might want to investigate are the Acrobat server
extensions that let your Web host download a page at a time rather than an
entire document. So PDF might be a great starting point, and as you
gradually begin to develop print documents that work better in HTML, you can
begin replacing the older PDFs with newer versions in HTML.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer