Re: Electrons First, Paper Second

["Tamminga, Ernie" <et -at- DSC -dot- COM>]

John Russell wrote:

My comapny is considering electronic/CD delivery as the primary means of
=
distributing our documentation collection, and providing hard copy only
=
as our customers request it.  As I began working a mockup of the =
electronic format, I realized that going from (converting/reformatting)
=
electronic to hard copy format was going to be difficult and costly.

I am familiar with "slapping it online," but this process usually refers
=
to writing hard copy docs and slapping them into PDFs, or the like.  =
That is, hard copy to electronic.

Has anyone out there written for electronic first and "slapped it on =
paper" afterwords?  How did you do it?  Would you recommend it to =
others?  Was it worth it? =20

Any info or opinions will be a great help!
===================================================
We're in the midst of doing it.
We've decided to optimize for online, in our upcoming product line. We
used to use FrameMaker, but now we're using MS Word, because our
online-help development tool of choice is RoboHelp, which brings itself
up inside of Word.
RoboHelp gives the capability to create hardcopy docs from the online
help files -- and they don't have to be identical to the online help, at
least not in the makeup of the document. You can set "build tags" to
control what goes into which medium, and you can manipulate a Table of
Contents to control what goes into the hardcopy, and in what order.

And yet... there are paper-oriented features you give up, when you go
this route. One minor but painful example is that you can't set up
cross-references such as "See Topic X on page 92". This is because
there's no such thing as "pages" in online help, and there's no
automatic way to make the system generate page numbers and resolve
cross-references when you go from online help to hardcopy doc.

That's the biggest glitch we've encountered so far. On balance, I think
the process we've chosen is a bit more convenient that if we had
optimized the other way. That is, if we had stayed with FrameMaker to
optimize for hardcopy, we'd then have had to export the Frame docs to
RTF files, pick those up in the online help development tool, and
massage the content to provide for hotlinked online help.

One caveat, though: in deciding to optimize for electronic publishing,
we also decided to avoid creating long, many-chaptered, highly
internally cross-referenced documents. If you need to produce that kind
of book, FrameMaker is still the no-competition tool of choice, even to
the extent of making it worthwile going the document-to-RTF-to-helptool
route for producing online help.

True single-sourcing of files to develop full feature-rich publications
in both media (electrons and paper) is still the Holy Grail, still not
attained. Some vendors (several of whom we heard from when we first
posed this general question to the newsgroup) are pressing in that
direction, but no one's really arrived yet.

Good luck!

--------
Ernie Tamminga
Director, InfoEngineering
Digital Sound Corporation
-----------------------------------------------
Opinions expressed are my own, and not necessarily those of Digital
Sound Corporation

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