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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:"Matt Horn" <mhorn -at- adobe -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:30:16 -0700
> 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.
It's a pretty tall order for even a great set of TOCs or indexes to help
navigate a "gigantic" doc set. Do you really expect your users to check
multiple different tables of contents or indexes to find info? The
product I work on right now has 6 books (well, 5 books and a huge online
reference) in the doc set. I wouldn't want to subject users to that.
Maybe you could produce a cross-book index and/or TOC, but the examples
of those that I've seen were far from great.
You can use Catalogs to allow users to do keyword searches across
multiple PDFs at the same time. Even easier, though, is just to use the
Search PDF function already in the reader (not the little dialog you get
with Ctrl+F, but the options you get when you click "Search" -- one
option is to search all PDFs in a particular directory).
Disclaimer: even though I work for Adobe, I am not on the Acrobat team
and don't know much more about Acrobat than the average user.
hth,
Matthew J. Horn
Sr. Technical Writer
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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