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Subject:Re: "Roll your own manuals" From:Peter <pnewman1 -at- HOME -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 13 Jul 1999 18:18:15 -0400
I think you will find that WordPerfect works much better than Word. I
find it difficult to say nice things about the master document feature
in Word. At this point I would not use WordPerfect 2000. It is an
initial release of a product by essentially a new group of programers.
For Win 98 or NT, use v 8.0.016 with service pack 5. It is fairly
stable. For Win95 or 3.x use V7,0 and apply the updates from Corel's
website.
HTH
Peter
"Laura J. Lockhart" wrote:
>
> Matt Craver asked:
>
> <snip>I'd like to be able to distribute a CD-ROM and have
> the clients specify which "documents" make up a "book". I don't
> particularly care whether it's HTML, PDF, W97 or FM files. Anyone know of
> such a system, or am I going to have to do my own macros/ programming to
> make this happen?<snip>
>
> Let me preface my remarks by saying that there's probably a less antiquated=
> system than what I'm about to suggest, but it may be a starting point. I =
> used to work for a consulting firm that sold modular software documentation=
> ; at that time, we sold zip files of enough chapters to create anywhere =
> from 5 to 15 manuals, depending on the subject matter. The documents were =
> created in Word Perfect using the Master Document feature---at that time =
> we used 5.1, but the same feature exists in the newest Windows version. =
> =20
>
> In addition to the "chapter files," we included on the diskette a master =
> document template that had pages with all of the copyright and editorial =
> information; clients signed a contract saying that they could modify the =
> text files however they wanted, but they must include these pages in their =
> printed documents. We also included some simple Word Perfect macros (and =
> instructions for how to copy the macros to the proper directory) that =
> would prompt the user for which chapters they wanted to use; the macro =
> would insert the proper subdocument file name. Another macro would search =
> for character strings that would allow the user to number the chapters and =
> generate a table of contents and index. (I believe we used something like =
> <<ChapterNo>> on the first page of each chapter and in headers). =20
>
> If your users don't have WP, I suppose Word has a similar feature, but =
> WordPerfect macros are so easy to create and simplify the end-user's task.
