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Re: Poll: Provide documentation in PDF & Help formats, or only in Help formats?
Subject:Re: Poll: Provide documentation in PDF & Help formats, or only in Help formats? From:"Julie Stickler" <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:57:34 -0400
If you want information on what your customers expect, check with your
sales department, and whoever writes your sales contracts.
Customers will often have quite specific questions about the
documentation in their requests for proposals (RFPs) including do you
have manuals and/or online help, do the docs have tables of contents,
do they have indexes etc. Not having PDF documents could cost you
sales.
I'm pretty sure that if you have government contracts that you're
required to supply "printable" documentation. At my last job we
interpreted that to mean PDFs. And really, if your'e single sourcing,
once you get the templates set up, creating a PDF in addition to your
online help really shouldn't take that much extra time. When I was
using FrameMaker it took me about 20 mintues to generate a PDF. Now
that I'm single sourcing out of Flare, I think that I have it down to
less that 15 minutes, and most of that is just me being obsessive
compulsive about not publishing anything that I haven't reviewed at
least twice for human errors.
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