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I have been in a similar situation and I'll briefly describe what I've done
to deal with these issues. One thing you haven't mentioned (and may not be
an issue in your case) is the maintenance of the Documentation. Snazzy can
be relatively simple and sometime not very time consuming to create but a
nightmare to maintain and so I highly recommend keeping this in mind as you
design your system.
Our output is Print, PDF, and online (.chm in one case and .hlp in another).
To simplify we have moved to using FrameMaker for pretty much all content.
>From FrameMaker we use things like conditions and inset text to repurpose
content for various users guides and I have also attempted to set up the
content and so I can use the same content for different configurations in
the future. We then use RoboHelp for FrameMaker to create the online .chm
help from the FrameMaker files. Even when we have content that, at this
point, is not used for print or PDF we still create and store the content in
FM. We previously used RoboHelp and so when we moved to RH for FM I still
use it to create and merge the .chms made from RoboHelp for FrameMaker. I
believe it may be possible to do some of this without RoboHelp Office but
I'm hoping that RoboHelp for FrameMaker will beef up the merging
capabilities in future versions and so I can accomplish the same thing
without RH.
That's a very simplified outline of what we do. There are other Hatts and
technology to accomplish basically the same thing. However, my experience is
that it is critical to design and develop such a system from the ground up.
ROBOHELP X5: Featuring Word 2003 support, Content Management, Multi-Author
support, PDF and XML support and much more!
TRY IT TODAY at http://www.macromedia.com/go/techwrl
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