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January 31, 2005
Conversion
At work we've gone though a big conversion, moving content from books authored in FrameMaker to SolBook documents. The bulk of the work was done by Steve with help from Ron over in Menlo Park.
It's amazing how well they've managed to capture the content we had in Frame and dump it into SolBook. Still, there's cleanup to be done.
The worst of it may be refitting all the links. We're moving this content around as well, and so the linkend locations are changing at the same time we're doing the conversion and writing new material. Maybe now that we're getting everything into registered olinks, we'll someday be able to move to a more easily malleable format, like something derived from DITA.
The time has come for better ways to assemble smaller chunks. If you look at what Sun and others are doing with software, a lot of the same building blocks go into different packages. One could imagine a system where some work on the core content for small-grained features, others work at higher level to offer how-to material for particular markets.
What I don't know how to do is have the how-tos people would be paid for fit better than the how-tos people don't have to pay for, unless you hit the higher-end markets, without increasing the quality. You have to deliver the kind of doc that leaves readers feeling enlightened, not just something "technically accurate and complete." Readers probably perceive technically accurate and complete docs as only somewhat better than technically out of date and incomplete docs when the latter are written from the point of view of someone who obviously uses the software. Especially if they didn't have to pay as far as they could tell.
Posted by Mark at January 31, 2005 08:44 PM