Re: inline links (Re: Online help access question)

Subject: Re: inline links (Re: Online help access question)
From: Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com, Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2016 06:23:25 -0700

This is a terrific discussion! Thanks everyone.

Most software documentation is almost completely free of government regulation, in the US at least. Steven Janoff was talking about medical device documentation, where it may be hard to find something that ISN'T regulated. A lot of the fancier theories about documentation come out of the software world, where they have more freedom to think. But the people with these theories do seem to kind of ignore areas like medical devices under heavy regulation, or farm equipment manufacturers that sell tractors and seed spreaders internationally and are subject to the regulations of many countries, and also spend large sums on translation. By the way how do you optimize translation in an EPPO topic? Maybe it's easy but I don't see an index entry for translation in Mark Baker's book (which I like).

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://markgiffin.com/

On 10/5/2016 5:44 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote:

That's the world I work in. I haven't seen or talked with anyone about
a doc of any size that wasn't single-sourced, topic-based, and
task-oriented in over ten years. Hardly anyone sits down to read a
user guide. They start using the program and check the help when they
get stuck.

As a software user, I got used to nonlinear, searchable docs over 25
years ago. I think WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS was the first one I used
extensively.

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 4:26 PM, Janoff, Steven
<Steven -dot- Janoff -at- hologic -dot- com> wrote:

... any given user might navigate/use 1 percent of the information set, but the collective of users would justify providing 100 percent.

Well, good luck. Aside from the fact that this would seem to be a massive burden of time and money for companies large and small, you have the problem you identify of document-centric thinking. You're going against 500 years of the Gutenberg age; it's going to take several generations, at least, to purge that habit. Most of the people alive today were born and raised on the document tradition. Millennials can deal with it but millennials I've worked with and known have often wanted PDFs.


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Follow-Ups:

References:
Re: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: Chris Despopoulos
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: mbaker
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: Janoff, Steven
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: mbaker
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: Janoff, Steven
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: mbaker
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: Janoff, Steven
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: mbaker
RE: inline links (Re: Online help access question): From: Janoff, Steven

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