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Subject:Re: Online or PDF? Need suggestions... From:"Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 24 Feb 1997 15:32:11 -0800
At 11:03 AM 2/24/97 -0600, Jane Bergen wrote:
>I'm still wrestling with a mega-reference for our scripting language. I
>can't decide whether to attempt to make it a true doc-on-a-disk (just make
>it readable by Adobe Acrobat) or turn it into a more traditional WinHelp
>file. It will ONLY be used on Windows 95/Windows NT platform. Right now
>it's at about 530 pages.
[snip]
>Any suggestions? caveats? hair-raising experiences?
I'd say the deciding factor would be whether these online docs accompany
paper manuals or replace them. In my experience, most users *will not* do
without a piece of paper in their hot li'l hands. So, if you're also
delivering paper books, go all the way to hypertext. If online is meant
to replace paper books, leave it so that the user can print the book
and still retain some entry points into the doc via TOC and index.
Hyperlinks just don't work well on paper! ;-)
I put our user and reference manuals into WinHelp because we also
distributed paper. *Then*, the Marketing folks decided to distribute
evaluation copies without paper docs. All the evaluators wanted to
print the docs, so we put the postscript print files up on our ftp
site for them.
Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- expersoft -dot- com
-- The _Guide_ is definitive.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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