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Subject:Re: Printed & Online Manual, and Help From:Heli Roosild <HeliR -at- MSMAILHQ -dot- NETIMAGE -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:32:00 PST
Robin,
We do pretty much the same thing as Mitch--write our docs in FrameMaker
and produce the following from the Frame files for our documentation
deliverables:
Postscript files for the Docutech printing of paper manuals
Acrobat PDF files for an electronic version of the printed book (simply a
matter of running Acrobat Distiller on the .PS files)
RTF files for importing into ForeHelp to create WinHelp files
At the moment, we don't have an HTML requirement, but that should be easy
enough to do.
As Bill Burns said, the trick is to have a FrameMaker template that
reformats (a copy of) the Frame document for online help before you save
it as RTF. We've also found that it is easier to edit in Frame than in
ForeHelp, to remove text that doesn't need to be in Help. And an
alternative we've tried is to use Frame's conditional text feature to
identify Book-Only and Help-Only text, so that we can get one or the
other version easily.
Good luck!
~~Heli
Heli L. Roosild helir -at- netimage -dot- com
Manager of Documentation
Network Imaging Corporation
Herndon, VA
----------
From: Mitch Berg[SMTP:mberg -at- IS -dot- COM]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 1997 9:35 AM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: Re: Printed & Online Manual, and Help
> I am starting a new project in a week or so and part of the requirement
> is to have an online manual, a printed manual, and online help from a
> single source document. We are a service company and customers will use
> our web site extensively to place orders, maintain accounts, etc.
I personally recommend the following, if you can come up with the budget:
1) Write and maintain the material in FrameMaker. You can export
Frame dox to HTML, RTF or Acrobat formats very easily.
2) Use the Frame source to produce Acrobat and HTML
3) Use the RTF exported from Frame to produce the WinHelp files.
<snip>
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