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My company has mostly transitioned from hardcopy manuals to online help
and print-oriented PDFs. Some segments of the company produce only
online-oriented help or doc, with no pretense of anything with page-layout
considerations.
I'm looking for any stats, believable anecdotes, or other rhetorical
ammunition that addresses whether software users actually use/print
material that is provided in printable format or that they don't.
I searched techwr-l archives and the ACM Digital Library without finding
documents directly addressing a printable vs purely online approach.
Our users are reported to want printed manuals, or failing that, printable
material, to augment the online content (HTML Help in the application and
a web of book-style HTML pages, usually). We know that actually asking the
users or gathering evidence, for instance, of how many people download our
PDF pages, would be a closer to ideal set of information, but for the
immediate future, I'd like any data (or pointers to data) techwhirlers can
share.
Please respond to me directly and I'll summarize to the list.
Thanks--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kathleen Moore
Sr. Technical/Scientific Writer
Accelrys Inc.
kkm -at- accelrys -dot- com
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