Help & Manual questions.

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.



--
Kate Stout

Making It Clear

Writing and Editing Services
http://www.katestout.com
phone: 978-470-1192

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