First, the mandatory disclaimer: The content of this message is my personal view only and does not in any way reflect the opinion or position of my employer.
I couldn't agree more with the overall sentiment about Infocenter -- it's miserable. As a developer, I find it very challenging to get the technical content for the product I work on to be reflected in the pubs as I would like. We (the developers) do not have access to the tools the Information Development folks (a.k.a, the technical writers) use to actually produce the pubs. Consequently, we get sent XML and sometimes PDF for document sections to review. The cycle of attempting to "edit" these things to provide feedback to the ID folks followed by the next iteration to review is awkward (I use third party software to get the job done as best as I can, as do many of my teammates). We also have another HTML based internal tool to use for the review process, but it's even worse. Often, it's very difficult to know where in Infocenter (or even in which pub) the documentation being reviewed will ultimately reside. At least with a PDF or the BookManager format file one can see and navigate through the various topics in context. I still use the old V2.0.3 IBM Library Reader for Windows (READIBM.EXE), product number 5799-PXY. It runs fine in Windows 2000 and mostly OK in Windows XP (on XP it sometimes crashes with a GPF). It will not run at all natively on the 64-bit versions of Windows 7. Running a Windows 2000 virtual machine (Virtual Box or VMware) on the 64-bit flavor of Windows 7 is quite easy to setup and use. For PDF reading and editing I use Foxit PhantomPDF. Unfortunately, none of the PDF reading software has great document searching capabilities. The IBM Library Reader and the Softcopy Reader both do a dramatically better job against the BookManager format files. To me it's sad that the BookManager format is essentially dead. We haven't produced BookManager format documentation for the program products I work on for quite a few years. I fear the PDFs are going to be gone in the not too distant future. Bob
