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Aside from being portable and having easily understood navigation, printed manuals sometimes have an organizational advantage over online help.
Specifically, many online documentation projects were designed under the mistaken philosophy that the readers will only get to a given topic from a random context-sensitive link directly out of the application. As a result, the technical writer may have neglected:
To group and organize the topics into a logical sequence.
To include appropriate entries in the table of contents, which affords the reader on occasion with a much needed overview and scope to the material.
To implement browse buttons or other means of paging forward and backward around a topic for information that would normally be located nearby in a conventional manual, much less paging from cover-to-cover.
Because pop-up topics do not contain non-scrolling regions and other navigational buttons available in banner topics, they are excluded often from browsing, the table of contents, and the index for reasons of look-and-feel and consistency. This can make online documentation even less useful for the accidental tourist who relies on discovering new things by paging through what is available.
Note: Context-sensitive help is not the only random way of getting to a topic. Printed manuals have long supported the random nature of the index and table of contents, as well as cross-references to other topics. This is in addition to where a reader might land if they were to flip through the pages stopping at the pretty pictures. Aside from the speed, online documentation really only offer the incremental advantage of getting to a relevant topic directly from the application.
A context-sensitive help system should not be so fundamentally different from a printed manual. The technical writer still needs to:
develop a logical structure for the information.
put things in context.
provide a logical flow.
write content, because weak topics and thin content arent as easy to hide in a printed manual that can be skimmed page-by-page.
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Open-Source tools compliments of Voyant Technologies, Inc. and Glenn C. Maxey.
01/13/2003
TP Tools v2-00-0a
# tpt-hug-02