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I've been following this discussion group for a while and now I am
seeking some hard advice on the above subject.
I am the Documentation Manager in a French based multi-national company
who is a software editor of Automated CAM and Production Control
applications.
For the moment these two products are supported by paper only
documentation (600 pages/2 volumes for CAM and 1600 pages/9 volumes for
Production Control). This documentation has been done with Word97 on a
reasonably structured basis (well defined templates, macros, multiple
files using automatically generated TOCs and indexes).
We now want to (and have to) move on to On line Help, CD based
documentation, Web based documentation - and we have to maintain the
paper documentation.
My question is, is there a 'perfect' product which will allow us to
produce all these different document formats without giving us any great
maintenance headaches, i.e. we update one source and this generates
updating in the other media sources.
Another point of importance is that I really do prefer that we stay with
Word as the source of the paper document, although this is not an
irrevocable rule - but I will be very reluctant.