RE: Customizable user guide?

["Kathleen" <keamac -at- cox -dot- net>]

According to your requirements, I think you'd want to lock a PDF so that
it couldn't be altered, except perhaps for comments. I don't know if you
can lock and allow comments with Acrobat 7/Reader. 

But Acrobat 7 does allow you to insert bookmarks--with a detailed set of
bookmarks (e.g., every section and level bookmarked), your customers
could ignore things they didn't use. If they could insert comments into
the TOC, they could also make it obvious which components applied to
them.

So far as I know, you can't really lock a Word document. So if your
manager doesn't want the document altered (I'm assuming they mean the
document content, format, etc.), you wouldn't want to use Word. But my
experience ends with Word for XP, so someone else might know better.

OTOH, if the customer shouldn't "change" the document, you don't need to
use Word to prepare the doc, and perhaps there is a program that would
work better. I know you can use conditional text in FrameMaker to
show/hide different components of a document, and you could definitely
output each version to a locked PDF. But I've never done that--if you
might consider using a different publishing program, you could try
reposting to the list--many people have experience with a variety of
publishing programs.

HTH

Kathleen

-----Original Message-----
From: Art Campbell
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 2:45 PM
To: TECHWR-L
 Subject: Re: Customizable user guide?


I believe I'd use two tools in Acrobat 7. Baseline would be a document 
delivered in a .PDF created with Acrobat 7, and with Commenting Enabled.

Which allows the customers/users to add their own comments,
annotations, graphics, files, etc. to the .pdf. with (free)  Reader 7.
Including adding comments that say "We don't use this feature."

The second tool would be to tell the customers how to modify the
baseline .pdf with the full version of Acrobat, with which they could
remove sections that document features they don't use. Or, if you're
feeling entreprenurial, offer to customize their doc for them... for a
fee.

Art

On 7/5/05, Goldstein, Joan <jgoldstein -at- connected -dot- com> wrote:
> 
> One of my deliverables for the next release is to create a sort of
> template/boilerplate for a user guide that a customer can use to
create
> a customized version of the document. Because our product has a lot of
> features that customers can turn on or off before they install the
> software on an end-user's machine, we want to provide them with a
> document that allows them to pick and choose the descriptions and
> procedures for the features that they actually use in their
environment
> and build their own manual. (customers have actually asked for this.)
> 
> One of the requests from our product manager is that we create a
> document that does not allow customers to actually change the content
> that we provide but it should allow them to hide or show the relevant
> parts.  I will most likely use Word or PDF as for this document (our
> product is Windows based and these are probably the most common tools
> for our customers).  I've yet to find any built-in feature in Word or
> PDF that allows me to control content and then allow someone else to
> show/hide sections. Has anyone out there ever created a document like
> this? I'm lookin' for ideas!
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> 
> Joan Goldstein
> Principal Technical Writer
> Iron Mountain Incorporated
> 508-808-7327
> There will always be something to believe in.
>          ---Shawn Colvin




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