RE: .pdf vs. .html

["Anne Woolson" <anne -dot- woolson -at- rimage -dot- com>]

Thanks Scott

I've used FrameMaker in the past and much prefer it to InDesign, but we
are a small company so I have to use what I have...

I appreciate all the help.

Anne

Anne Woolson Quinlan
Supervisor, Technical Publications


-----Original Message-----
From: quills -at- airmail -dot- net [mailto:quills -at- airmail -dot- net] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 9:11 AM
To: Anne Woolson
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: .pdf vs. .html

In my opinion, and probably a few other, InDesign is the wrong tool for 
copmlex and long documentation. It's a stellar product for complex short

documents. If you look at what it replaced and what it's competitors 
were you can see that technical documentation isn't it's forte. It's a 
marketing production tool which has a different purpose and different
focus.

FrameMaker is a better tool for 300 page user manuals. Unfortunately, 
there isn't a conversion tool that is really good to translate InDesign 
to FrameMaker, unless you output your InDesign as RTF and import it to 
FrameMaker.

FrameMaker is also a better tool to get named destinations in your PDF 
output, and with tools available from third-parties, like Microtype, you

can truly customize your PDF output.

Using MIf2Go, you can output from FrameMaker to HTML or HTML help with 
very little problem. In the end you need good style templates to take up

your translation.

And to your last question, named destination isn't the same as a 
bookmark title.

Scott

Anne Woolson wrote:
> Thanks everyone for their responses. Just to clarify a couple things:
> 
> We currently use InDesign for 90% of our documentation. Word 07 for
the
> remaining 10%. I did try the automatic .html converter in InDesign,
but
> the result was a formatting nightmare.
> 
> We would still have to also create .pdfs for print. Though all of our
> documents are now distributed online or on a disc.
> 
> I have been able to open a .pdf from a URL using the #page= tag, but
> haven't had any success using the #nameddest= tag. Is the named
> destination the same as the bookmark title? 
> 
> FYI to quills -at- airmail -dot- net - I am the web developer too, so
communicating
> tag names won't be a problem.
> 
> 
> Anne Woolson Quinlan
> Supervisor, Technical Publications
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 22
> Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:09:31 -0500
> From: quills -at- airmail -dot- net
> Subject: Re: .pdf vs. .html
> To: "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com >> TECHWR-L"
> 	<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Message-ID: <4AC117FB -dot- 6070502 -at- airmail -dot- net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> Further, what type of graphics do you need to have accompany the 
> document? Does the user want to print sections? Is there a compelling 
> reason to switch other than someone in management wants to?
> 
> Searching is going to be a problem. Even if you reconfigure to an HTML

> help format you still can have search issues.
> 
> How are the documents distributed?
> 
> How much time to you have to analyze your document structure and
design 
> a CSS for HTML? Are they willing to eat the time and money to do so?
Are
> 
> they willing to accept a lesser level of design and layout?
> 
> As to linking to a specific point in a PDF document, yes you can do
that
> 
> if the link is to a named destination in the PDF. Which means you need
a
> 
> better understanding of PDF and a procedure to do this as well as to 
> communicate those named destinations to your web developers.
> 
> Scott
> 

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