Resources on Single Source Documentation

Subject: Resources on Single Source Documentation
From: Jodie Horowitz <Jodie -dot- Horowitz -at- HBOC -dot- COM>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 10:56:38 +0200

Can anyone recommend good articles or books on single source documentation?

To give you an idea of the issues I'm dealing with, the application I am
documenting has a complex GUI. It has been decided that the Help file must
stand completely on its own for at least three reasons:

1. For easy conversion from Help to paper documentation
2. To minimize QA time
3. To avoid interference with the functioning of the application itself

This means that What's This? help is out. As a result, all screens and
dialog boxes must appear in the Help topics themselves. I'm not aware of a
good way of scaling graphics, so this will make the topics lengthy.

It also means that most Windows 4.0 functionality cannot be used. For
instance links via A keywords are very useful in a Help file. But when you
create a paper document from the help file, you must manually insert these
links as cross-references.

So in the end, it looks like we're basically back to Windows 3.1
functionality in our Windows '95/NT application. Unless I come up with
some other ideas fast.

Thanks in advance for any information you can give.

Jodie Horowitz
HBOC Medical, Ltd.
Jodie -dot- Horowitz -at- hboc -dot- com

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