Subject: Re: printed manuals

From: "Bill Ross" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 11:34:22 +0400

I think the best thing to do for manuals would be to ship html
that the user could browse directly when the home web site
was offline or access slow. The latest manuals should also be 
on the main web site with a simple mechanism for updating
the user's version to match the main version as well.

Ideally, users could print something they'd like from html. I haven't
heard anything either way about the look of the results..

Moreover, if users could annotate their version of the html directly 
in the browser and especially if these annotations could be carried
forward when the html was updated, this would be ideal. I thought
some form of annotation existed, but don't see it on Microsoft's
Explorer. Maybe XML will make some of this wish list more possible.

As a user, I always prefer the on-line version of a manual, because
searching is so much easier. 

Bill Ross

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From: A J Turner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 22:24:06 +0100 (BST)

Hi!

I think maybe it is my fault - I forgot to do something that I should have
- I'll try and srt it out for you so you can have a go tomorrow!

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|Alexander J Turner         [email-masked]                  |
|Post Graduate              |http://www.bath.ac.uk/~chpajt/home.html|
|School of Chemistry        |+144 1225 8262826 ext 5137             |
|University of Bath         |                                       |
|Bath, Avon, U.K.           |Field: QM/MM modeling                  |
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From: [email-masked] (Jeffrey L. Nauss)
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 17:03:37 -0400

> heard anything either way about the look of the results..

The results are very dependent upon how the web page is designed.  If the HTML
documentation is set up as one large page wiht embedded target markers, the
printout is usually satisfactory.  However, if the documentation is broken up
into several pages with access coming from an index page, the printout is less
useful.  One cannot easily printout the entire document much less with page
numbers and an intelligent index.

While I agree with Bill that on-line documentation in HTML format can be very
useful, there are many situations where I prefer a good old-fashioned hard copy
with page numbers, a table of contents, and a good index.

-- 
  Jeffrey L. Nauss, PhD           Telephone: 513-556-0148          
  Dir. Molec. Model. Serv.        Fax:       513-556-9239
  Department of Chemistry         e-mail: [email-masked]    
  University of Cincinnati        URL http://www.che.uc.edu/~nauss