What .pdf does work well for - was: Re: Nielsen frags PDF...

["Jan Cohen" <familyforever -at- mindspring -dot- com>]

Okay, imagine you're creating .pdf versions of the documents you produce.
They're well written and formatted, have a great table of contents, and
chock full of cross references in just the right places.  References that
make it easy for the online reader to jump from one part of a book to
another, pertinent section.

Now imagine you're selling training that can be accomplished online, via the
internet; and/or packedged on a CD and viewed via a browser.  Your customer
just bought this 1.2 million dollar system you make, and now wants to buy
the training that goes along with it (you're cheap, and didn't include the
price of training in the system you sold them).  You develop this fantastic
course that leads your customer from A to Z and 1-10 through the how's and
why's of your system.  Realizing that your "online" training program was
designed as such though, you've got to fill in a number of gaps.  You've got
a bunch of additional docs you'd like to ship with the course to provide
detailed reference information where the customer might want to review such.
These docs could be detailed data schemas, in-depth layouts that don't fit
in your courseware's "window," or even a full product documentation suite.
And because they're put together properly as Acrobat .pdfs, your customer
can choose between viewing them on a computer screen or printing them out to
read wherever.

Now the customer has a built-in choice.

How much does it cost to ship a complete set of printed docs to support your
customer?  And how much does it cost to put them on the same CD your
courseware is on?  Which looks more appealing: a 10-stack of 750 page books,
or a list of well referenced docs you can click on in your browser window,
to view in any of the feasible ways you'd like?

I'm not trying to say that .pdf documentation is the answer in all cases...
there are people out there who like to look at nicely bound doc sets in
their overly full, teetering doc cabinets.  But if you create them properly
and deploy them wisely, you might find many of your readers fairly pleased
with your approach.  And a bit ironic...

...you might even find a number of the people who actually open some of your
books.  Maybe even your system's users.

Jan Cohen

I once had an ancient, hand-me-down SPARC 4.  Never did open the user
documentation for it; gee, I didn't even know where it was.  Of course,
until I became fluent in using it, I did often find myself referencing my
pocket guide to UNIX.



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Mercer University's online MS Program in Technical Communication Management:
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See www.mercer.edu/mstco or write George Hayhoe at hayhoe_g -at- mercer -dot- edu -dot- 

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