RE: Convert Paper Documentation to Web Format

["Brierley, Sean" <Sean -at- Quodata -dot- Com>]

Hallo:

HTML is a crude layout standard, it does not support nearly as many
formatting conventions as a word processing or DTP tool. In short, HTML has
severe formatting limitations.

Why do you want to convert the documents to post them on the web, what is
your budget, staff, and time frame?

For example, why cannot you simply put the Word files on an FTP server for
people to download. Very few people don't have access to Microsoft Word.

Printing PDF files might be the best answer despite your reservations about
download time. Turn off all bookmarks, and turn on and turn up graphics
compression, and text compression, don't embed any fonts, etc. If all else
fails, try creating a compressed file, such as ZIP format for Wintel
downloads. PDF will display the formatting of your original document and
will easily permit the printing of the whole document, or part of it.
Creating PDFs will take little time, relative to other conversions.

Consider if you create HTML format from your Word files you might end up
creating many, many individual HTML and graphics files for each document you
convert. You can ZIP these, so they are downloadable as one file, but
managing these separate files might be a PIA. Also, I'm not sure the file
size will be especially small with many graphics broken out into GIFs.

What do we do? We distribute our books as PDF, as well as paper. Why?
Because we can update the PDF quickly, it reduces our printing costs, the
customer can print out the range of pages they want, and formatting is
retained. Plus, we have few resources in terms of dollars, time, and staff,
and PDF is an efficient compromise.

Best regards,

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Julie Johnston [SMTP:juliajaj -at- hotmail -dot- com]
> 
> I work for a company in Illinois that produces a large volume of 
> documentation in paper format.  One of our future plans is to post the 
> documentation on the web.  I've tried to convert the docs from Word to 
> FrontPage, but I end up losing some of the formatting.  Since there is
> such 
> a large volume of documentation, it would be very time consuming to
> convert 
> all the documentation manually over to web format.  Could you please let
> me 
> know what other companies do that are experiencing the same issue.  Does 
> anyone know of any companies that specialize in converting paper docs over
> 
> to web/HTML format.  We looked into converting the docs to PDF format, but
> 
> there's an issue with file size & download time.  Thanks for your help.