The best solution...?

[Valerie Priester <hammerl -at- buffalo -dot- edu>]

Hi there! I work at a large state university, and help prepare documents 
for our users (the 25,000 or so students who range from freshmen to 
post-graduate and professional). These include documents to connect to our 
network from campus residence halls, from wireless access points in our 
libraries, or from a home off campus, as well as documenting some homegrown 
software and providing quick starter information for software installed on 
our networks. Up until now, we've provided printed copies for students, as 
well as pdf files. We have some  very vanilla html files for ADA and New 
York State disability guidelines, but, to be perfectly frank, they're ugly 
but serviceable. We've been told to switch to a mostly online format by 
Summer 2003. We'd been toying with re-creating our info in HTML with CSS. 
Then I went off to SIGDOC and won RoboHelp Enterprise X3. Not wanting to 
look a gift horse in the mouth, I'm wondering if it's going to work well 
for what I need. Most of our documents fit on a single sheet of paper -- 
they've been designed for print in a minimal amount of space to save trees 
and money. Our longest documents are under 40 pages. Another catch is that 
we may need to provide printed versions of some of our documents on an 
as-needed basis to professors for use in classes.

We've currently got documents in Office XP, FrameMaker 6 for UNIX (don't 
ask), a lovely WebWorks Publisher piece that I can't convince our UNIX 
group to find time to install (It's been almost a year and a half, again 
DON'T ASK), and a copy of PageMaker 7. (Hey, at least I got rid of the 
nroff and TeX.) I've got Dreamweaver sitting on my machine as well, if that 
inspires anyone.

And if RoboHelp doesn't work for what I need to do at work, should I just 
bring the box back home, install it there, freelance on the side, and save 
up for that dream car (or, right now, the insulation I need up in the 
attic)?

Is there a better idea that I'm missing?

Valerie Priester
hammerl -at- buffalo -dot- edu


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