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RE: Feedback requested: What doc format do your customers require?
Subject:RE: Feedback requested: What doc format do your customers require? From:"Andrew Warren" <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com> To:"Shawn" <shawnly9 -at- yahoo -dot- com>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:19:53 -0700
Shawn wrote:
> Do your end-users still require documentation in PDF (regardless of
> whether they actually read it or not!)? My feel is that they will
> require a PDF as a security blanket, but then want the "nicety" of
> other tools....online help, flash demos, HTML documentation, etc.
Shawn:
Our end-users are engineers; I can't imagine any of them having the
patience to sit through flash demos or click through HTML docs. They
want printed documentation that they can read at their leisure, mark up,
take home, carry to the lab or to someone else's office, refer to on the
bench next to the circuit they're designing, etc.
However, they don't want their printed documentation to actually be
delivered on paper. That takes too long, and besides, they can't find
anything in printed docs because no one provides a good index anymore.
So they download PDFs and print them... And when they can't find what
they're looking for in the hardcopy, they search the PDFs. For them, no
online help format could be an adequate substitute for printable PDF.
Other demographic groups of end-users probably have different
preferences.
-Andrew
=== Andrew Warren - awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com
=== Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
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