RE: An organizational conundrum

Subject: RE: An organizational conundrum
From: "Hemstreet, Deborah" <DHemstreet -at- kaydon -dot- com>
To: "Holly Steele" <hsteele1 -at- gmail -dot- com>, "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 09:20:13 -0400

Hi Holly,

At the end of the day, I am not sure that Word will meet your needs...

The complexity of your documents, and the amount of time you are wasting
on their dissemination will justify a different writing tool.. Off the
top of my head, I am wondering if Author-It would solve some of your
problems, without having to go to the huge investment of an XML-based
content management system....

Author-It will let you produce PDFs and online help, and Word documents.
(See http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=modpub).

I'm not trying to sell something here, I know several people who say
Author It has helped them with your kind of issues... And I know you
need to get your project done...

Not the answer you want to hear... But at the end of the day - Word is a
Word Processor, not a full desktop publishing single-source solution...

I believe for now, you are going to have to live with redundancy until
you can get a more robust system going.

Sorry this is not more helpful.

Deborah

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+dhemstreet=kaydon -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+dhemstreet=kaydon -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Holly Steele
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 6:04 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Cc: lara. johnson Johnson; lara. johnson
Subject: An organizational conundrum

Hello everyone

I want to say first how grateful I am to all you who read my questions
and
give suggestions. Techwr-l is a really excellent resource, so I want to
thank you all.

I have an organizational conundrum. I have a solution, but I don't like
the
solution because document management is not controlled.

The company I am working for has four common documents that are used in
different user guides. Some user guides use all four, some two or three,
and
some only one.

These common documents live on the network drive as subfolders in a
folder
called Common.

Clear, easy document management so far.

Here is where the problem starts...

User guides are designed for an Agriculture and Forest audience. I have
used
templates and hidden styles to create conditional text and images in the
areas where the User Guides differ for the different users.

Each manual is composed of chapters.

Manual A has 13 chapters plus 4 common chapters

Manual B has 1 chapter and 2 common chapters

I need to create one full document for the client and also to send to
reviewers.

Using INCLUDETEXT is not an option because when I do that, the document
won't open properly or display the images. Also, I need to embed all the
images in each chapter because I am importing to Flare and Flare doesn't
accept linked images. With all the embedded images, the document is too
large for the computer and odd things start to happen.

So, my co-worker and I decided to use PDF to try to solve the problem
and
grab the individual chapters by PDF and put it all together.

Sounds great, right. Keep the common chapters in the common folder and
the
specific user guide chapters in their respective folders and just grab
what
you need. Place the PDF somewhere that makes sense and we have a good
document organizational system.
Unfortunately, things are seldom as easy as they seem. What about the
Table
of Contents? Ah yes, RD fields.

To create RD fields, all the chapters need to be in the same folder.
This
means that, for example, the QB common chapter will need to be in the
Manual
A folder as well as the Manual B folder.

To make matters worse, the page numbers will be different (I suspect)
when
using the Agriculture template, the Forest template, and the review
template. So, to get the pagination right for the RD fields we need to
make
three copies of QB (one for the Agriculture folder, one for the Forest
folder, and one for the review folder (Review copy shows all conditional
text))

My concern is that with all these copies around someone will make
changes to
a copy and those changes will not get transferred to the QB document
that
lives in the common folder.

I could use read-only files in the different user guide folders. That
would
solve the problem of people changing the wrong version, but I would have
a
bigger problem: if a change was made to QB (in the Common folder), that
document would have to be copied to all the manuals that use that
chapter (I
am not sure how many use that chapter...but I think at least 5, possibly
more).

They want single-sourcing so this kind of mess doesn't happen. But,
putting
the chapters together with INCLUDETEXT doesn't seem to work either.

I would love to be able to do this project in a system that would suit
my
needs better (like FrameMaker). However, the company wants everything in
Word and on-line help.

So, if you are up for a puzzle, I would love to hear your suggestions.

Thanks everyone.

Holly
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ComponentOne Doc-To-Help gives you everything you need to author and
publish quality Help, Web, and print content. Perfect for technical
authors, developers, and policy writers. Download a FREE trial.
http://www.componentone.com/DocToHelp/

True single source, conditional content, PDF export, modular help.
Help & Manual is the most powerful authoring tool for technical
documentation. Boost your productivity! http://www.helpandmanual.com

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