Printing of HTML files - section by section ? (LONG)

[Niebergall Peter-APN001C <apn001c -at- EUROPE -dot- MOT -dot- COM>]

Hello 4000+ TECHWR-Ls!

I've been lurking for a good week now, and as opposed to certain previous
list-newbies I won't judge for now. Some threads are highly interesting,
others aren't (and the power to skip and delete whatever doesn't interest me
is mine). One definitive TECHWR-L advantage seems to be the sheer volume of
activity. Let's see if you experts here deserve the amount of incense you
burn on your behalf...

I've got a problem in the leeway of biggest lie number two (single source,
no maintenance please, ho, ho):

I am in the process of writing a Help Desk procedure/user guide for a rather
large electronics company. No trained writing "colleagues", I do it as a
lone departmental TW wolf on a contracting basis. The quality auditors
insist on one integrated paper version. The potential users don't want to
read the management garble (i.e. exec summaries, intros, strategic
chapters), they just want the flowcharts and checklists to support their
everyday workflows - preferably on the Intranet. So I've created one Word97
document (consciously avoiding the Masterdoc-approach), which includes piles
of Visio-based flowcharts and checklists spread throughout the individual
sections.

Now I want to put the flowcharts as separated GIFs to the Intranet, define
clickable hotspots on the "defined partial process"-flow elements, which
hyperlink to the corresponding bookmarks of the Word-document, which are
kept when I save the doc as .html. So far, so good, since the "Master" Word
doc can be updated in a controlled fashion (doc control is a term that
engineers/managers here handle like the effort to nail a pudding to a wall -
often started, never done). Once updated as .doc, saved as .doc, saved as
.html to a predefined webserver directory - that's the degree of maintenance
that even the perms can handle.

The flowcharts online are individual HTML-pages with "embedded" GIFs, they
can be printed easily with readable results using the "Print"-button of the
browser used (we use Netscape and MSIE, both in 4.x versions).

Here's the problem: Once the users click the hotspot, they are given the
corresponding section in the HTML-version of the document. But if they want
the checklist as a printout and hit the same browser "Print"-button, they'll
get the whole document - very much undesirable.

So I see three possibilities to resolve my problem (if I haven't missed an
obvious one):

1.) Is there a HTML 3.2 or 4.0 markup tag/directive/etc. that defines
section limits to be printed out individually if the browser has a
"mouse-over" in the same section? Probably not. (It would have to work with
both aforementioned browsers)

2.) I produce a reduced subset of the complete procedure/user guide
containing only the user-relevant sections, flowcharts and contact lists.
Mucho maintenance, not elegant.

3.) I write a Perl script that takes Word as an OLE-server and generate
semi-automatically (depending on some "included section, HTML page
name"-flat txt file) separate HTML pages from the "Master" Word doc sections
via VBA-statements passed from the Perl script, which then serve as
references for the flowchart hotspots. I don't feel very comfy about the
notion of many OLE-processes running on a busy webserver, anyone out there
with experience ? Maintenance for this approach is a can of worms, since I
am one of two Perl adepts here..and as soon as one knucklehead renames a
section - boom...

Any suggestions ???

What I definitely don't need are "do it in SGML or Frame or Lotus Groupware"
comments, I have no choice on editors. We are a Murkysoft Select client with
a capital freeze, oh well.

Since I assume the problem to be too specific for the 4000+, please respond
offline, I will gather the answers and post them (if they are worth posting)
as a summary...

Thanks in advance from a lurker awaiting...

 Peter


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