how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?

["Kate Stout" <KStout -at- bcgi -dot- net>]

Hi Samantha -

There are a lot of possible options - As others have pointed out, make
sure that your TOCs and indices are useful. Make sure that you create
bookmarks in your pdf so that there is a navigable TOC, and make sure
users know how to use that feature. (Sorry but I can't tell you how many
times people have expressed their unending gratitude when I showed them
the bookmarks space in Adobe Reader, and there's my useful TOC.) And
here are some other ideas, in no particular order. Some may apply to
your situation.

 

-        Make sure that the book titles are clear. I worked with one
company that had one product composed of 7 parts and they had User
Guides for each part, and install guides for some of the parts and then
conceptual manuals to explain all the parts, and so forth and so on...
Because they also chose very bad and inconsistent titles, no one ever
knew which book to look in. 

 

-        Consider a "front end" to help people get to the right
information quickly - if the install is a six step process you could
create a web page that links to the right books. Or if there's a
decision tree, ditto.

 

-        Add more links within your documentation to guide users to
related material. This is often an underused technique.

 

-        You can create HTML from Framemaker or Word files, and also
generate PDF. Webworks is one of the most commonly used tools for this,
but it is one of many. Webworks can create html output that uses the
index to create a search index. It's a decent feature.

 

But what you really asked was how to make it more searchable!  I think
the reality is many people are addicted to the simplicity of the google
model of typing in some words and getting a decent match back. None of
this using the TOC or index - they're becoming lost skills ;-)

 

One solution to that is that google now sells a product that lets a
company "google index" information. It works on a range of files
including Office documents and pdf. I don't have many details, but I've
seen a demo. If google offers it, there's probably other products out
there with a similar set of functions.

 

Good luck!

 

Kate

 

 

 

Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 10:14:24 -0400

From: "Samantha Slate" <samantha -dot- slate -at- gmail -dot- com>

Subject: how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?

To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Message-ID:

      <5b060fd0609220714j7a6700d1ib33f0f4412e8e8bf -at- mail -dot- gmail -dot- com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

 

hi there,

 

The doc group that I work in has been presented with an interesting

challenge.

 

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. 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. 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?

 

Also, have any of you ever been asked to enhance search capabilities for

your documentation? If so, how did you respond to the request?

 

thanks!!

Samantha

 




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