RE: Online help formats (Was: ANNOUNCE: WebWorks Publisher training)

[Thomas Michanek <tmi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Debbi Leipold wrote:

> I do not feel that pdf is a viable form for on-line help but can be included
> as part of an on-line help system.  On-line help is hyperlinked based.
> Although you can do links in pdf you are basically contained to a long
> document format.  People want the short file appraoch in help where you link
> and just have short pieces in view.

Then I guess you mean that if you use Frame as your authoring tool,
you would write "long" documents and then use a converter that splits
the Frame files into several smaller HTML files? Otherwise one could
argue that you should try to write short files already in Frame, which
would give short PDF files.

But personally I don't see "long" files in PDF as a problem. If you
design your Frame files for online viewing using a suitable page size,
you effectively present short pieces in view. You have to "turn" pages
but that isn't really different from scrolling an HTML file.

As an example, look at Frame's own online help. It's not PDF, but it
could have been. I like its basic approach and layout (forget the
contents :-), and I'm not disturbed by the fact that a file contains
more pages than the ones dealing with the current subject.

> At the frame users conference there was someone who did do this and not to
> discourage them but I was not impressed.  You need easy search

Don't you think that a search index created by Acrobat Catalog provides
a good search? I guess there are better search engines for HTML, but
you need some sort of cross-file plug-in for that, right?

Regards,

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Thomas Michanek, Documentation Manager, Telelogic Tau
Telelogic AB, Teknikringen 9, SE-58330 Linkoping, SWEDEN
PHONE/FAX:  +46 (0)13 200656/212166
EMAIL:  mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telelogic.com
WWW 1:  http://www.telelogic.com
WWW 2:  http://hem1.passagen.se/framers
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See you at the Telelogic User Conference '99, May 19-21, in
Barcelona, Spain: http://www.telelogic.com/news/userconf.asp


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