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Not sure if we've wound down on this, but (and jump to the end if you want
to see the summary and question refinement) ...
Wow -- lots of excellent philosophical discussions around this topic! I'm
surprised at how many people (and the high percentage of you in agreement)
say that readers will still want PDFs as a primary doc delivery mechanism --
provided of course that it's appropriate for the information being
delivered.
Certainly the discussion hinges on the audience & info -- print API docs are
user UN-friendly and HTML is much easier for programmers to use (as well as
being the preferred output for many of the better approaches to producing
the docs in the first place).
My current user base is not API-using engineers, but SaaS application users:
decision makers, integration engineers who integrate their own e-commerce
websites with the SasS app, and the dominant user base -- not the e-commerce
website's users but the client's B2B users who are performing
admin/monitoring type work using the client's SaaS app's functions (via the
client's Dashboard, for which their users have secure accounts ).
So we think it'd be best to deliver more point-of-delivery help -- embedded
and context-sensitive content in the app's Web-accessed Dashboard -- but for
the other things we're still thinking about whether users will want more:
* Knowledge Base articles,
* Videos,
* Shorter more focused PDFs (regardless of the authoring tool, which still
could be either Word or a more "modern" flexible tool),
* HTML-delivered instructions (not for the integration efforts, which are so
long - 100-page PDF of instructions and code segments -- but for the easier,
shorter instructions for the admin/monitoring functions through the
Dashboard),
* Wiki pages (whether moderated or user-community-and-editable),
* User communities/forums,
* Something I haven't thought of?
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