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Re: how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?
Subject:Re: how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable? From:Al Geist <al -dot- geist -at- geistassociates -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Sat, 23 Sep 2006 10:06:12 -0400
Samantha Slate wrote:
Much of our documentation is intended to help in-house consultants
and tech
support, as well as the occasional tech-savvy customer, with the
very
complicated task of installing and configuring our products.
Currently, we
publish all of our docs as PDFs. However, we've been getting
complaints
recently that the doc set is not easy to navigate.
Sounds like a TOC or Index problem. If your TOC is accurate and your
document logically designed, your customers should have no problem
finding information.
We are looking at
reorganizing the books in ways that will seem more intuitive to
users, but
even so, we would like to be able to offer some sort of
advanced-search
capabilities that lets the user search more than one book at a
time, using
more than one search term (unlike PDF, which only lets you search
for one
text string at a time).
The obvious thing (to me) that comes to mind is a
password-protected web
site.
How would a password protect site solve your document navigation
problems?
But is it possible to single-source our documentation so that it
can
be used both as the content of such a Web site *and* in a
PDF-publishable
format, since some customers do still want the PDFs?
I've seen threads on this subject at least twice a year on this site,
and I've been a member for quite a while. What do you use currently
for your document creation software and how much is your company
willing to spend to move to something else?
Also, have any of you ever been asked to enhance search
capabilities for
your documentation? If so, how did you respond to the request?
Anything my readers want to help them find the information they need
is open for discussion. Try looking into search programs such as ZOOM
from WrenSoft. I used it at a previous position and it did a great
job, even searching PDFs.
Al
--
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