ITauthor

As part of my on-going, long-term quest to find a single-source way of producing top-quality online help and printed manuals, I came across the following slide show about DocBook by Dan York of Mitel Networks Corporation: www.lodestar2.com/people/dyork/talks/2002/ols/docbook-tutorial/frames/frames.html This dates back to 2002, but it's pretty thorough and provides a good overview of the subject. My search for a single-source solution continues. The trouble is that, at the moment, we produce excellent (award-winning) online help, using Microsoft HTML Help, Dreamweaver, CSS, Javascript and ActiveX - all tied together with RoboHelp. We also (as an entirely separate process) create printed documentation, for the same applications, using FrameMaker, saved as DocBook XML source files. What I'd really like is to be able to create help systems that do everything our current ones do, but are stored as DocBook XML source files which we can then edit in a FrameMaker (or a FrameMaker-type application) an produce PDFs and hard-copy manuals. It's the single-source dream, but - while I'm prepared to compromise a little on the quality of our printed manuals, if necessary - I'm not prepared to compromise on the quality of our online help. I'll keep looking.