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Subject:RE: HTML or PDF? From:"Cassandra Greer" <cassandra -at- greer -dot- de> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 1 Mar 2005 11:04:35 +0100
>
> Cass,
> The reason they are cheaper is:
> 1. they take less time to produce
> 2. The price of the upgrade license is lower.
> While the above points are arguable, I've never encountered a
> contractor who actually charges money for delivering PDFs and a
> contractor who does not charge for delivering webhelp (or any
> other format of help), when the source is another format (in my
> case Word).
Have you or anyone else asked your customers/users what they think about the
PDFs? I don't know what your product is or how much it costs but if any of
your customers/users are put off by using PDFs and a few are lost because of
them then the PDFs aren't 'free'. If this is not the case, then continue
using PDFs. However, the extra time it takes to create Webhelp may pay for
itself over and over if it actually does help your customers/users get the
information they need and more quickly which could also influence whether
they stay with you and refer you to others. Is it not about what the
customers/users need in the end?
I, personally, dislike it immensely when the information I need is in a PDF
because Acrobat Reader is sooo dang slow (esp version 6) in relation to any
of my browsers. I have the full Acrobat mess and the fact that they use PDFs
for their help bugs the heck of me too so that I have bought 3rd party
vegetation-based books to help me instead of using Acrobat's help.
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