Re. Doing online docs and printed books simultaneously

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

     Let's start with a standard, well-accepted premise: The online medium
     and the printed medium are sufficiently different that you must design
     your information differently for both, resulting in a fair bit of
     duplicated effort. For example: a typical 7X9 inch user manual won't
     fit well on a typical small computer screen, so the page layout must
     differ; fine graphic details are lost at 72 dpi (computer screen)
     resolution, so graphics must differ; blind references such as "see
     above" don't work online, although they can work well on paper; and so
     on, for at least several pages.

     Now, here's the kicker: Let's assume that you start designing your
     information for an online version, and design it so all your text is
     nicely chunked to work well inside a 3.5 X 4.5 inch box. Your text is
     so concise the readers think that it's a self-decompressing file when
     it expands into their minds. Your graphics are distilled down so that
     they don't rely on details smaller than 1/72nd of an inch, and work
     brilliantly at this low resolution. And so on, for the several pages
     referred to in the previous paragraph. In short, you've produced a
     _great_ online doc.

     It occurs to me that this sounds an awful lot like the prescription
     for success in print too, not so? By coincidence (hah!), two of your
     3.5 X 4.5 boxes will fit on a 7 X 9 page... the same size as your
     typical printed manual.

     So why can't you simply reproduce the online layout, two per printed
     page, and let this become your printed manual? You'd have to make some
     important changes, such as substituting tables of contents for
     on-screen hypertext menus, _good_ indexes for online search functions,
     etc., but the information and its presentation should still work just
     fine. Now I'm certainly, playing devil's advocate here, because I'm
     aware of several stumbling blocks, but it seems to me that you could
     plan around these. You could certainly do better designing entirely
     separate versions that specifically take advantage of the strengths of
     each medium, but here's my question: could you produce a satisfactory
     printed manual by starting from a well-designed online version? Let
     the debate begin!

     [Note: to keep the debate focused, let's not invoke SGML: SGML
     represents _how_ you'd mark up your text, not whether you could design
     a single version of the text and graphics that would work well in both
     media.]

     --Geoff Hart    =#8^{)}   <--- who knows what evil lurks in
                                    the men of harts? My shadow knows.
     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

     Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of
     our reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.