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Re: Online help and the elimination of the printed doc

Subject: Re: Online help and the elimination of the printed doc
From: David Knopf <david -at- knopf -dot- com>
To: Daniel_Hall -at- trendmicro -dot- com
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:24:38 -0800

Daniel_Hall -at- trendmicro -dot- com wrote:

Limited resources - it's sort of an either/or question.

Since the product is being completely revamped (even the underlying architecture will be completely different), none of the documentation will be "updated" - it will need to all be rewritten, mostly from scratch. Knowing that, I can:

1. Invest most of my time in the printed manual (general practice here), with help that's mostly just re-purposed manual content.
2. Invest most of my time in the help system (with all that detailed, control-level, stuff) and trim down the manual.


I don't really understand this equation. Why must you invest most of your time in *either* the printed manual *or* the Help system? Both are made up of content, and if you invest in the content rather than the output format, you can produce both deliverables with only a minimally increased investment of time and resources. Unless there is very little overlap between your deliverables (print and Help), which seems unlikely, a good single source workflow would enable you to create and deliver both sets of content so that you do need to choose one or the other.

Regards,


--

*David Knopf ~ Knopf Online ~ San Francisco*
mailto:david -at- knopf -dot- com ~ http://www.knopf.com

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RE: Online help and the elimination of the printed doc: From: Daniel_Hall

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