Re: how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?

Subject: Re: how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?
From: "Pro TechWriter" <pro -dot- techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "Samantha Slate" <samantha -dot- slate -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:50:30 -0400

Good question...

I will be watching this topic with interest. Our documents are in a
transitional phase. Some are already converted to HTML in WebHelp. Other
department's documents are linked in the WebHelp file as PDFs.

If there is a search utility that will work with PDFs as well as HTML, I'd
like to know about it too. It will be a while until I can covert the PDFs
into HTML, and in the meantime, Webhelp does not search inside the PDFs (as
far as I can tell, anyway).

And, by the way, I've seen lots of research that supports that experienced
and highly-technical PC users search first in online documents, then look
for something in a TOC or index last, especially if they grew up using
computers and the Internet. So, don't automatically assume that a great TOC
and index means that a really good search engine is not needed--not true :-)
Of course, I am providing as many paths to the documents that I can,
including a TOC arranged by topic, department, and other criteria (date,
state, and so on), but a really great search capability is also necessary.

Ciao,
Pro -dot- Techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com

On 9/22/06, Samantha Slate <samantha -dot- slate -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:


hi there,

The doc group that I work in has been presented with an interesting
challenge.

Much of our documentation is intended to help in-house consultants and
tech
support, as well as the occasional tech-savvy customer, with the very
complicated task of installing and configuring our products. Currently, we
publish all of our docs as PDFs. However, we've been getting complaints
recently that the doc set is not easy to navigate. We are looking at
reorganizing the books in ways that will seem more intuitive to users, but
even so, we would like to be able to offer some sort of advanced-search
capabilities that lets the user search more than one book at a time, using
more than one search term (unlike PDF, which only lets you search for one
text string at a time).

The obvious thing (to me) that comes to mind is a password-protected web
site. But is it possible to single-source our documentation so that it can
be used both as the content of such a Web site *and* in a PDF-publishable
format, since some customers do still want the PDFs?

Also, have any of you ever been asked to enhance search capabilities for
your documentation? If so, how did you respond to the request?

thanks!!
Samantha
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Easily create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to any popular
Help file format or printed documentation. Learn more at
http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList

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WebWorks ePublisher Pro for Word features support for every major Help format plus PDF, HTML and more. Flexible, precise, and efficient content delivery. Try it today! http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l

Easily create HTML or Microsoft Word content and convert to any popular Help file format or printed documentation. Learn more at http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList

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how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?: From: Samantha Slate

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