I'll try to answer point by point: Bruce: I think the the .chm is the thing to concentrate to make significant improvements. I will keep the .hlp text up to date, but I don't think this format is worth investing significant work in
Me: I agree although you can search for any character in a HLP file and you can't in a CHM. But CHM's are so much easier to create and edit. Bruce: The .doc should really be a pdf. Me: What's the advantage? PDF's load slower and for those who don't have Word there are free Word viewers that are a heck of a lot faster than Acrobat. There's nothing so fancy in the DOC that it can't just as well be distributed as an RTF either. That would open both in Wordpad and Word, as well as a zilion other apps in all platforms. I'd go with RTF - it's open source too - or stay with Word. Bruce: It would be great to have the PowerPro reference chm formatted like the tutorial, but again I suspect this is a lot of work since I am not sure if the chm makes best use of styles and I suspect you would need to apply many manually before using the tutorial style sheet. Me: Well actually HTML is easier to style than DOC, since you can have independent stylesheet(s) that you can switch around. It's also easy to change your HTML formatting with regex if you've been lazy and haven't applied styles. If you want something really spiffy you can have multiple stylesheets and let the user switch styles. Bruce: Alan has offered to edit the chm/hlp/doc, so this will come first. If you an interested in doing work on the main chm after that, let me know what you would want to do. Me: The more the merrier. I'm a designer and have some experience with HTML, PDF, and document conversions so I suggest that Alan should leave the technical and stylistic aspects to me and concentrate on improving the text content. However as I said it would be smarter to get rid of the document proliferation right at the start and opt for a reduced number of HTML files. That way you only have to rewrite once. When rewrites are finished, I'll just take all the HTML's and compile them as a CHM, as well as paste them into a single DOC. They can also be uploaded to the web. So a strategy decision is called for before doing any rewriting, and one of you guys have to provide an FTP. If you accept my proposal that means I have to decompile PPST.CHM (or someone sends me the source) and convert the DOC to HTML, clean it up and chop it into manageable chunks. Then I'll pop everything into an HTML frame with a menu so you know what's where. We can keep the frame navigation in the CHM an dispense with the CHM's own sidebar. I usually do that or have a pop-out javascipt menu (much like PPro bars) that scrolls with the page. What this entails for you and Alan is that you have to use Frontpage instead of Word for editing. Even if you've never used an HTML editor you'll find that it's no sweat, a lot of it is just like Word. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70 http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/JV_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/power-pro/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
