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Re: Paper Manual to Online Help - where to start?

Subject: Re: Paper Manual to Online Help - where to start?
From: dmbrown -at- brown-inc -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 21:28:34 -0700


David Neeley wrote:

How about *this* for "economical"...convert the manuals to OpenOffice.org and save to .pdf. Updates would be to the original OpenOffice files, with new versions exported to .pdf as required.

That's no easier than doing exactly the same thing in Word, AND they don't have to learn a new tool.

One virtue this possesses--besides the *free* aspect of OpenOffice.org--

...which is no virtue at all, since they already own and use Word.

is that its native file format is XML. Thus, once you have the docs cleanly in OpenOffice, if need be you could fairly easily convert them to just about
anything you liked by using XSLT.
Thus, you'd be building a considerable amount of "future proofing" in the process.

Oh, puhleeze.

So, she takes this document that a bunch of "users" (her word) have updated, apparently with little or no attention to the consistent application of styles (her statement), and it's in XML.

Now she has an XML document in which all the elements have the same tag, the XML equivalent of "Normal" with a bunch of character formatting applied to differentiate headings from body text from code samples from footnotes.

How is that any better than what she's already got?

--David

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Re: Paper Manual to Online Help - where to start?: From: David Neeley

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