Re: Which product should we use?

["Barry Campbell" <barry -dot- campbell -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Samantha, you've had some excellent advice about tools, but I just
wanted to point out that if you're going to single-source your
documentation, your writing style and especially your information
design strategy are at least as important as the tools you choose.

Think "modular" to the extreme... you'll be putting together documents
by assembling components, and those components need to work both by
themselves and in possibly unpredictable combinations with other
components.  In my single-sourcing efforts, I've actually found this
to be a bigger challenge than picking the right software, although
that is certainly not trivial.

By the way, if you go with some variant of XML, you will almost
certainly *not* want to provide your customers with your actual source
files (you probably don't want to do this anyway!) but with some kind
of editable edition of your documentation that they can use with the
tools they have.  Exporting to a Word-compatible format (RTF?) or even
HTML would work for this unless your customers are savvy enough to
handle XML; in some industries they easily could be but in most they
won't be.

- bc

--
Barry Campbell <barry -at- campbell-online -dot- com>
http://campbell-online.com
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