Re. Roadblocks from online to paper

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

     In response to my original posting about obstacles in using your
     online text directly as your printed manual, Glenda Jeffrey
     maliciously <grin> winked at me, and I never could ignore a wink from
     a bright lassy. Hence, my riposte:

     In addition to points raised in my original note, I see the following
     main logistical hurdles in moving directly from the online version to
     the printed version:
     1. Hypertext references: you'd have to rigorously identify each chunk
     of text so you could replace a hyperjump with a "see page XX"
     reference; the hyperjump itself contains no information of the form
     "see the chunk that discusses hypertext links", so you'd have to
     handle this manually or via a database used to organize, sort and
     publish your list of chunks.
     2. Logical vs. physical organisation of the paper version: Online
     info. has a physical structure (or should that be sequence?)
     determined solely by where the info. sits on the hard disk, and a
     logical structure that follows the menu or hypertext network hierarchy
     you've established. For paper text, the physical and logical
     structures are one and the same. Thus, you couldn't simply dump the
     online version onto paper without first planning how to map its
     logical structure to the more constrained physical structure of paper.
     3. There would be an awful lot of white space unless you planned the
     online text so that it scaled up or down to fit exactly on the printed
     page. White space should never be accidental, and always looks
     wasteful to readers who aren't designers, so there are two possible
     problems here.

     I suspect that there are others, but I'm posting in haste (there's
     that "posthaste" oxymoron again!) and I'm eager to see what the rest
     of our techwhirlers can come up with. I'm also very interested to see
     how Glenda's efforts turn out once they hit the readers... as I said
     in the original posting, it _should_ be possible to convert the online
     version directly into print (without resorting to SGML), but there
     will be roadblocks. Glenda, if you can get it to work, submit your
     solution to the STC publications/online help competition... you've got
     a good chance at winning because of the ubiquity of the problem of
     doing online and paper simultaneously.

     --Geoff Hart    #8^{)}
     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.