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David Demyan wondered: <<We publish all of our customer documentation
in PDFs on a CD. The CD has a menu system that includes links to all
documents. I have created a "catalog" sheet that has a brief one
paragraph description of each document. There are about 15 documents on
the CD and some of the titles, while descriptive, do not provide much
in the way of detail about the contents or purpose of the described
documents.>>
The catalog is a great idea, but less effective than building this
information directly into the "menu system" you described above. Such a
menu system is trivially easy to create as an HTML page, with links,
popups, and lots of room for descriptive text. Or you could stick with
100% PDF and accomplish basically the same thing using Acrobat.
The key is to avoid forcing readers to go elsewhere just to find out
what a link will display: think "embedded help", not "leave the
application, launch a browser, juggle windows for 10 minutes, read the
explanation, close the browser, pick a link" WinHelp. <g>
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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