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>Does anyone know of an authoring tool that allows you to create technical
>documents that can be deployed over windows-based and unix-based systems?
>The documents in question are user manuals. I also need to create
helpfiles
>that can be deployed over both operating systems...
I don't know of any authoring tools that *don't* allow this. After all,
authoring is not the point. The point is presentation. Authoring and
presentation are two different concerns. They may be handled by the same
tool, or they may not.
The question is, do you want to create one presentation that can be viewed
on both platforms, or do you want to author one information set which can be
processed for presentation on different platforms?
If you want to create a single presentation that can be viewed on both
platforms, ASCII, HTML, and PDF are all possibilities.
If you want to author a single information set and then process it to
produce different presentations for different platforms, you have many
possible options, depending on the kind of limitations you are willing to
live with. For a completely unfettered approach, you can use XML/SGML and
write OmniMark programs to transform your data into any format you need.
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Mark Baker
Senior Technical Communicator
OmniMark Technologies Corporation
1400 Blair Place
Gloucester, Ontario
Canada, K1J 9B8
Phone: 613-745-4242
Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- omnimark -dot- com
Web: http://www.omnimark.com