Re: Slight departure from Estimate for On-Line Project

[Faith Weber <weber -at- EASI -dot- ENET -dot- DEC -dot- COM>]

Paul Beck writes:

>electronic documents and online documents.  This brings up a question. If you
>are producing a true online document, how much of a departure from the printed
>page does that entail?

>With the levels of information complexity, I can see technical reference
>material closer to the page based approach.   There are graphical things you
>can produce (for example flowcharts that are hyperlinked) for some of the
>information, but moving into a multimedia or a video type presentation for
>highly technical information may not be that efficient.

Paul, you're way beyond the kind of online stuff I'm talking about.
You're talking multimedia, and I'm talking Windows Help or the
equivalent. For me, at least, this still involves quite a departure
from the printed page. Off the top of my head, the differences
include:

   o    change in style to conform to screen font/page sizes

   o    writing style; sentences must be shorter, paragraphs must
        be shorter, detailed info must be extracted and organized
        so it's easy to access but is not a distraction for
        new users, etc.

   o    determining topics, scope of each topic, how topics are
        organized and linked -- in some cases this will be similar
        to the paper doc, but in others it won't be similar at all.
        Reference documentation, as you mentioned, is often
        easier to convert to online docs than procedural info.

That's not including any format and/or tool changes, which may have
to be done manually if there's no conversion tool available.

Regarding how much value is added by putting documents online,
I think it's substantial. It fixes a lot of distribution problems
we have with paper docs, it doesn't require space on the user's
desk, and users can look for marginally-related topics without
going to two or three different books. Some of our users would
prefer to view a regular page online than have no online docs
at all, but the majority would very much prefer the kind of
well-organized hypertext help we're aiming to (eventually) deliver.
I'm just starting a couple of experimental projects to see how
much work is involved.

I'm a novice at this, so it would make more sense to ask the same
question of someone who's experienced this transition already.
But the limited experience I do have, particularly with Windows Help,
gives me the impression that doing help or docs online requires a
different way of thinking about (and organizing!) documents.

Faith

P.S. William Horton's book, which I think is called "Writing and
Designing Online Documentation", covers in detail the differences
between paper and on line docs/help, as well as the advantages and
disadvantages of same.