RE: On-Line Vs. Print, Single-Sourcing, and how to ignore the obv ious

["Suzanne Chiles" <suzchiles -at- pobox -dot- com>]

Jason,

It's not that the information is so vastly different. It's that delivery
mechanisms are so vastly different that attention must be paid to how (and
if) the information is written for each type.

Any usability specialist will tell you that users are not likely to want to
read very much while they are online. No matter how good a monitor one has,
lots of online text is just damned hard to read.

If you've got conceptual information to present, or a scenario or tutorial,
it's pretty much given that very few readers are going to take the time, and
the eyestrain, to read it online. This kind of information is, imho, much
better suited for print. Tasks and procedures are the bread and butter of
online help. It's there to give readers the information they need to perform
the task at hand. If they want to find out how the software works, you'll
probably want to give the reader diagrams, sample screens, and a good bit of
explanatory text and your users will likely be happier reading it in printed
form.

Suzanne



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