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Subject:Help & Manual questions. From:Kate Stout <stout -dot- k -at- comcast -dot- net> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 01 Dec 2005 07:18:16 -0500
I recently had a similar situation, and ended up using R2Net. They have
an even simpler version called HTML Express, that had less "bells &
whistles" Product details are at http://www.logictran.net/products/. The
price is cheap, too, $69.
If by "Help" you mean being able to produce web pages with good
navigation, this answered the need pretty well.
The basic model is like most of these conversion tools. It uses word
heading styles as the basis for splitting the document into pages. If
your Word inexperienced users are going to have problems with that, then
you're already in big trouble ;-)
I picked this tool because my customer had to have bread crumbs. HAD TO!
and this had native support for generating them.
Based on using it for a while here's my pro's & cons
Pros
-User friendly front end
-If you stick to the basic models provided, works well.
-30-day trial lets you experiment to see if you can get the output you need
-There's a mode where you can generate CSS based output, letting you
customize the look.
-Cheap
Cons
-If you don't like the basic models, it can be very hard to customize.
I've got a coding background, so I went and modified scripts, etc. but
it's not for the faint of heart. Pick this product only if you're
basically happy with the output as is (minus font/color choices you can
change in css)
-Not much support. I did find three things I couldn't fix myself, and
got an answer on only one of them, despite me trying to follow up
several times. My impression is this may be a small group of people.
Do I recommend it?
With the warnings noted above. But to be honest, none of these tools
make me very happy. Different problems for each, but they all seem
fragile in one way or another.
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