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At MYOB® (Mind Your Own Business) Australia, we have just finished our first single-sourcing project using mif2go to convert FrameMaker source files to HTML Help *.chm files. These files are also the source of our printed user guide and the hyperlinked PDF of the user guide placed on the distribution CD.
There was considerable once-off pain setting up conversion templates (including CSS files) and conversion options but our next project will be much faster. The converted files do not require any hand tweaking -- we just hand over to the release people to put the *.chm file on the installer CD.
Our testing and support people are rapt, and consider the new help far better than the old help. It has a navigation pane with Contents, Index, Search, and Favorites tabs, a toolbar with Hide [navigation pane], Prev, Next, Back, Forward, Print, Options, and Welcome (custom Home) buttons. An outsider would have no inkling that the help was converted from FrameMaker source files as the appearance is completely different from the printed book and hyperlinked PDF. You, too, can single-source successfully provided you plan beforehand and your team understands the process.
View both works by Finger, Hedley
View all 13 works published by IRTC |
The Joy of Single-Sourcing
http://www.soltys.ca/techcomm/articles/the_joy_of_single-sourcing.html
Finger, Hedley
IRTC
2001
Abstract: At MYOB® (Mind Your Own Business) Australia, we have just finished our first single-sourcing project using mif2go to convert FrameMaker source files to HTML Help *.chm files. These files are also the source of our printed user guide and the hyperlinked PDF of the user guide placed on the distribution CD.
There was considerable once-off pain setting up conversion templates (including CSS files) and conversion options but our next project will be much faster. The converted files do not require any hand tweaking -- we just hand over to the release people to put the *.chm file on the installer CD.
Our testing and support people are rapt, and consider the new help far better than the old help. It has a navigation pane with Contents, Index, Search, and Favorites tabs, a toolbar with Hide [navigation pane], Prev, Next, Back, Forward, Print, Options, and Welcome (custom Home) buttons. An outsider would have no inkling that the help was converted from FrameMaker source files as the appearance is completely different from the printed book and hyperlinked PDF. You, too, can single-source successfully provided you plan beforehand and your team understands the process.
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