Re: Overcoming archaic doc tools?

Subject: Re: Overcoming archaic doc tools?
From: Jean Weber <jean -at- wrevenge -dot- com -dot- au>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 17:56:57 +1000

Jeanne complained,

I work for a large company (1,700 employees) that still uses IBM BookMaster for all manuals. Help! It is the most archaic un-user-friendly piece of software I've used in a long time.

I *like* IBM BookMaster! But then, I also code HTML by hand in a text editor, and the tags are much the same, so it's no big deal (Bookie was a great way for me to learn tags in my pre-HTML days).

Anybody deal with converting over 300 manuals to a modern word processing tool?

IBM has tools for converting BookMaster to various other things, including (I believe) Word, but I don't know if those tools are publically available or not. I suggest you contact IBM, or see if there's anything useful on their website. If not, someone who knows how to write scripts could probably write one fairly easily to convert the Bookie tags to something else; someone suggested FrameMaker's MIF, and RTF should be another possibility.

You'd probably have to do some fiddling with page layout and tables after the conversions, depending on the complexity of the existing manuals.

Regards, Jean
Jean Hollis Weber
mailto:jean -at- wrevenge -dot- com -dot- au
The Technical Editors' Eyrie http://www.wrevenge.com.au/







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References:
Overcoming archaic doc tools?: From: Jfuller246

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