Re: Single-sourcing: the possible dream? Mif2go, etc.

[Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca>]

hedley_finger -at- myob -dot- com -dot- au wrote:
> 
> Fellow keyboard artistes:
> 
> Have any of you gone down the path of single-sourcing FrameMaker
> documents to produce Win HTML Help, generic Web pages, etc?

I don't do Windows, except for some games and browsing, but I do
produce single source docs:
http://www.freeswan.org/docs
Stuff currently on site is HTML-only. PDF and Postscript sometime
this week, once our 1.6 release ships.

> Specifically, what tools would you recommend?
> 
> -- mif2go
> -- HTML Transit ($US5000 per seat = $AU10000; whewee!)
> -- Quadralay Webworks Publisher

I use htmldoc. $0.00 (even in Canadian $) from www.easysoftware.com
plus some of my own tools, downloadable with the FreeS/WAN code and
of course freely reusable.
 
> How did you accommodate the terse topic-to-a-small-page style of on-line
> help with the more discursive style for printed books?  How did you design
> the book pages so that the output has appropriate navigation: Next,
> Previous, Back, Forward, To Contents, To Index, Help/Web Home, etc.

htmldoc atutomatically creates Table of contents and inserts links
for Next, Previous and TOC into each section.

One of my tools builds a permuted index from the HTML <h1>, <h2>
etc headers:

http://www.freeswan.org/freeswan_trees/freeswan-1.5/doc/perm.html.html

This is far from an ideal way to index documents, but it is useful.
 
> Our bright-eyed team of eager writers awaits your wisdom.
>