Online Help Editors?

[Ben]

Thank you, Geoff. I will try the first solution you mention. I would
appreciate if you'd be so kind as to give your insight on developmental
editing for Online Help, for example, re-organizing topics and books in a
Help project. I'm thinking about sending a revised outline of their Help
Contents in MS Word so the authors can compare against their original Help
project.

-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Hart [mailto:ghart at videotron.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:25 AM
To: TECHWR-L; Ben
Subject: Online Help Editors?

Ben wondered: <<For those of you who edit Online Help written by  
other authors, I'd like to ask this question. How do you mark up the  
Help and give it back to authors?>>

You have a range of possible solutions. If the help is being written  
in Word*, then that's the easiest solution: edit using revision  
tracking, review the edits, then compile the final help file. If not,  
you can copy or export the text to Word so you can use revision  
tracking to clearly indicate changes and insert substantive comments;  
it's easy to review the comments and either manually make the same  
changes in the authoring software (which risks introducing new  
errors) or copy the final text back into the authoring software  
(which also isn't perfect, but at least reduces the risk).

* Here and elsewhere, substitute any other word processor that uses  
revision tracking, including WordPerfect and OpenOffice, if you prefer.

If you don't want to do the copy/paste bit, and do want to try using  
revision tracking, you can sometimes "round-trip" the edits using an  
intermediate format such as RTF or HTML that exports neatly from your  
authoring software and can be opened in Word. RTF is pretty good for  
round-tripping and allows you to use revision tracking. HTML is a bit  
trickier (see my description of how to do this in the techwr-l  
archives) since you have to basically use Word as an ASCII text  
editor rather than as a "save the file in Word HTML format", but it  
works very well indeed.

However you proceed, the goal is to clearly indicate changes so that  
the authors who must review the changes, see what you've done, and  
approve or reject each edit. Details of a range of potentially  
suitable approaches are provided in Chapters 12 and 14 of my book  
(see link below my signature), plus some thoughts about proofreading  
online documents in Chapter 16.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart at videotron.ca / geoffhart at mac.com
www.geoff-hart.com
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***Now available***  _Effective onscreen editing_
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