Technical writer dream made real?

[Alessandro Bottoni <albo -at- CADLAB -dot- IT>]

Thanks for your comments regarding cross-media documentation development.

I visited the Quark (www.quark.com) and Astrobyte sites (http://www.astrobyte.com) and I discovered that it is possible to write high quality level paper documentation with Quark Xpress and convert it to an high quality level HTML document with Astrobyte BeyondPress filter. 

BeyondPress give you an HTML 3.2 + CSS Level 1 document that conserves all the most subtle clues of your original Xpress document (see the CSS1 samples at these pages: http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/css/gallery/4.htm, http://www.freerange.com/portfolio/showcase/css/css-zo.html and http://www.astrobyte.com/BeyondPress/Overview/30WebPage.html)  

This method has a few important advantages:
1) You can reuse you original paper document
2) You can have the same look both on paper and on HTML
3) You can keep a single "information database" (a set of Xpress files) and extract the information you want to put on the media at "printing" time (I can figure out several ways to do it: a database with links to external documents, a Perl extraction procedure based on "information types" hidden in the document, etc...)

This method has a few important limits: 
1) as long as I know, Xpress does not support hyperlinks, so you have to add them to your HTML document by hand
2) CSS1 are supported only by IE302 and NC4 in this moment. This means that you cannot read these documents on Unix systems.
3) It requires a very carefull "engineering" and administration.

I still do not know if this pair of programs have made real my dream but, for sure, they go on my same direction.

Any comment is welcome

P.S. I do NOT work for Quark or Astrobyte.

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