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Marie-Jo is <<... trying to convince a small, inexperienced documentation
team that it is a bad idea to simply print out the online help files to
produce manuals.>>
It's not necessarily a bad idea; if the online help follows the same
structure as a printed manual, and contains all the same contents (including
contextual information that explains the purpose of the software and how its
parts link together), then it could produce a reasonable printed manual. Of
course, it would suck as online help, but that's another story.
<<I am looking for arguments to defend this point.>>
Well, there are obvious problems such as the lack of page references and the
fact that the structure of many help files is seemingly random (because
they're intended to be contextual) rather than structured in a sequence that
makes sense. (That is, the context for a help topic is provided by the
currently open dialog box, and is therefore not explained in most help
systems; in a manual, there's no dialog box open, so you need to provide the
missing (con)text.)
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"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
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Help Authoring Seminar 2003, coming soon to a city near you! Attend this
educational and affordable one-day seminar covering existing and emerging
trends in Help authoring technology. See http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l2.
A new book on Single Sourcing has been released by William Andrew
Publishing: _Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation_
is now available at: http://www.williamandrew.com/titles/1491.html.
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