Re: Online Doc but no paper

[Cathy McNair <cmcnair -at- SPICER -dot- COM>]

>Does anyone know of any definiative study that provides conclusions for the
need >of both on-line and paper documentation? I have a programmer here who
says >he does not want any paper manuals just on-line help.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any one definitive study, but I do work for a
company that tried going to mostly online three years and received a bad
response. Instead of doing away with books completely, we produced a small
"Tutorial" manual that was really a mini-User's Guide, covering just a few
features with some exercises. Numerous customers thought we had simply
forgotten to give them their User's Guide. Others complained that the
"Tutorial" wasn't complete, that, oops, we'd forgotten to document functions
X, Y, and Z. Management nonetheless nixed the idea of a User's Guide until
they were desperately trying to find information about a particular function
on paper for an important client, but that function was only documented
online. Since then we've produced User's Guides and online help.

I've been surprised to find that even with user populations that you'd think
would prefer only online help, some individuals still like books. For
example, I've been flabbergasted to discover some of the programmers here
asking the company to purchase books for some of the products they use.
Online help is great for providing immediate help with a problem; books lend
themselves better to more leisurely learning of more complex procedures.

As someone else said, books can also add value to the product. Our company
recently invested in colorful covers designed by professionals and have
since found the manuals to be useful marketing tools.

All that said, however, there is no denying producing both is something of a
duplication of effort and printed manuals are much more expensive than just
online help. I think an ideal solution would be to produce one source
document that would be usable online (that is, that is context-sensitive,
that allows full text searching, that contains hyperlinks, that is chunked
for effective reading online, and so on) but could also be printed out and
distributed on paper (with page numbers, a table of contents, an index)
should the customer want that. The Windows online help does not support
printing the entire thing as a book. I know Adobe Acrobat claims it can do
that, but some people on the list have complained it doesn't really live up
to that promise. I've also heard that you can use SGML files with certain
applications to create an effective electronic document. Does anyone have
experience doing that?

Cathy McNair
<cmcnair -at- spicer -dot- com>