Re: "PDF just sucks as a help medium" (was: RoboHelp: Ready to Publish...how do I do that?)

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

PDF isn't a bad medium for UA (dropping "Help" because it's not) but  
it's certainly not the best. By the time you format your source  
templates to work in a Help context, add in all your links and related  
topics, and add in your bookmarks, you may as well have created a Help  
format of some kind.

Time to launch is a non-issue because there are ways to launch pretty  
much every Help system faster.

PDF *can* be used for UA fairly well, but especially in the case of  
context-sensitive Help you're really better off researching a best-fit  
Help format than trying to bend PDF to fit.

---
Bill Swallow
http://techcommdood.com
Sent from my iPhone.

On Jan 14, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>  
wrote:

> You're comparing apples and oranges. A local online help system is
> faster than downloading a PDF because it's local.
>
> When viewing over the Web, I have on several occasions found PDFs
> generated with Fast Web View and hosted by a compatible Web server
> loaded faster than Web help generated by WebWorks. (Quadralay may have
> improved performance, I haven't used releases past WWP 2003.)
>
> PDF isn't the best format for online help, but it's by no means the  
> worst.
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