Re:Highlighting new material in Webhelp - temporarily

["Michael West" <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- com>]

 > From: "McLauchlan, Kevin"
 > At a new release of an established product, how can I highlight the 5%
 > or 10% of material that is new, so that it stands out from the stuff  
 > that's been in place for months or years of previous releases?

You could use a "conditional text" heading or label to flag the items in the
help text -- something like "NEW!".

But rather than jazz up the text with stuff like that I'd rather include
with every major release a new TOC group titled "What's new in version 4.1"
or whatever. That topic group would include a summary of new features and a
listing of them with hyperlinks to the related help topics.

My reasoning for this is that as a user I might be interested in reading a
run-down of new features when I first load up the new release. But when I'm
in the trenches trying to do something and I have to go to the help file to
find out how, I really don't give a rat's posterior whether it's new or old.
Just gimme the facts and then shut the hell up.

--
Mike West

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