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I'm in a similar situation. My solution has been to use
plain-vanilla HTML pages. Since we have lots and lots of legacy
paper documents, link those in using Adobe Acrobat. The emphasis
has been content over aesthetics. While the result is crude, it
can be viewed on any platform and the users don't need special
software to view it. Initially I used Netscape composer, which
yields ugly HTML code. Since then, I've used mostly Notepad (on
Windows) or nedit (on IRIX). W3C has a tool called HTMLTidy,
which will clean up HTML code (which improves portability). I'd
like to add an index one of these days, but that's a low
priority.
I'm not terribly happy with using Notepad to write the HTML
because I suspect I've consumed time that more sophisticated
development software would have saved. Further, we will be
spawing off another version of the software, so multiple
versions of the docs will be needed shortly. This will cause
maintenance problems for duplicate information that must be kept
in synch. I'm still researching options for dealing with this.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
-- Meg
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Naomi (Stevens) writes:
I've been offered a contract to produce on-line documentation
for an application designed to work on multiple platforms.
(Currently works on PC, Mac and Unix although development is
underway for others.) A single set of files is required which
will run on all browsers without the need to use Java.
May I please have advice on which writing tool would be the most
effective to produce the documentation for this application?
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