Re: Online help formats (Was: ANNOUNCE: WebWorks Publishertraining)

[Phil Buxton <philb0@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas Michanek wrote:

> 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?

No...(IMHO); Acrobat has a very basic search engine, it can only look
for words that the user spells the same way as the author wrote them, I
believe; if you want real on line help, then you are going to have to
get a fully functional search engine with Boolean logic, "proximity
searches", full user-readable index etc. to give the user some real
help.  And you need to be able to search across collections of "books";
Adobe has this feature, but the collection is defined by the writer, not
by the user, I believe.

HTML and PDF can be used to create a good help system, but I think you
need to look at things like XML/SGML because of their useful meta data
that can be put to great use in a search.  (For instance, Find me all
alarms associated with I/O cards in the installation manuals.)

There are systems out there that can do this, you just have to be able
to integrate these engines into your system.  It is do-able and not at
extreme cost.

Phil
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philb0@bellsouth.net
(615) 872-7789
(615) 974-3370

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