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Subject:Re: Electrons First, Paper Second From:David Young <davidy -at- WEXTECH -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 18 Jun 1997 11:34:42 -0400
John,
>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.<
You may want to look at Doc-To-Help. Doc-To-Help's true single-source
approach enables you to create and maintain printed documentation and
Online Help from one source document without having to compromise in either
medium. You do all of your authoring in Word and then allow Doc-To-Help to
convert this document into Help. The single source (printed/Help)
philosophy of Doc-To-Help allows for the use of conditional text so that if
you have certain constructs that you want solely for your printed manual or
solely for Help you use Doc-To-Help's "Mark As Help/Manual Only" feature
to mark text that you don't want included. Obviously you have complete
control of how you want both your printed and on-line documentation to
appear.
Ernie Tamminga wrote:
>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.<
Doc-To-Help also takes care of this. During the conversion from .DOC to
.HLP Word's cross-reference will get replaced with a hypertext link and the
page number (not applicable for Help will get removed).
David Young
Senior Technical Support Representative
WexTech Systems, Inc.
techsupp -at- wextech -dot- com
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