FW: Question about printing using FrontPage

[Lynn Perry <clperry -at- WALLDATA -dot- COM>]

> Lisa Comeau asks:
>
>How is Front page for print output? Any comments or suggestions?

We use FrontPage 98 to create our HTML documentation. Although I can print
the doc from FrontPage, I find that there are some visual aspects such as
the hyperlinks printing with dashed underlines and the border around tables
printing (we use tables for Note, Tip, and Important text). Printing in the
browser looks better, but neither meets my requirements for "quality" needed
for printed documentation.

Ultimately, the issue is the old tradeoff between online (or on-screen) and
print. The requirements are different, so one of the two outputs will
probably suffer. Your requirements for printed quality may not be as
stringent, so this solution may work for you.

Our solution is to create PDF files using FrameMaker as the authoring and
conversion tool for our printed docs. We have some overlap between the two,
which results in the problem of dual-sourcing, updating two sets of doc
instead of one. If we carefully planned our docs and stuck to our
definitions, we could probably avoid this.

Our group has a relatively small amount of information that falls into this
category, so this approach works with only a modicum of pain. Others may do
a better job of single-sourcing than we do, and those with large doc sets
typically do not have the luxury of dual-sourcing.

good luck
LyP
clperry -at- walldata -dot- com