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Goldstein, Joan 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.
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I'm with Lou. Use HTML. Everyone does have a browser, HTML can be edited in Word (or some other tool), and it would be pretty easy to do. Now, of course, you could get fansy. You could develop a Web-based tool that provides a list of all of a manual's topics along with checkboxes. The user could then click the checkbox for the topics they want to get rid of (or click the checkbox for the topics they don't want). With a little javascripting, you could have a nifty little system that let's the users choose the topics they want to see and hide everything else. This, of course, migtht take a little doing. Then again, there might also be something out there already that does this.....have you looked at SourceForge?
The only question I have is why management doesn't want the customer's changing stuff? I suppose the obvious answer is they don't want to be held liable for mistakes made by the customer....but wouldn't an in-house set of static docs cover this? Let the customer change what they want, I say! :-) Might make them happier. And honestly, if a customer WANTS to change something, they WILL find a way. :-) There should be some happy ground between making it so that the customer doesn't destroy their docs and making it so that the customer can change content so that it makes sense to them.
Hmmm. Now that I think about it, maybe Apache Forrest would be the way to go..... hehe
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