🚀 go-pugleaf

FM6, WWP 7, Acrobat 5.05, Win2k. 

Okay, my 650-page document gets sent to press as a 552-page one-color PS file, for CD-ROM delivery as a color, 552-page PDF with hyperlinks, and with the sofware as an 1,800-topic, context-sensitive online help (CHM) document with related topics and popups in the help. 

After the original doc was written (actually, I have one remaining set of comments to implement), it takes 15 minutes to create the online help, the CHM, and about 20 minutes each for the PS file and CD_ROM delivery PDF. 

Am still compiling total times, but here's an example of some efficiency: A week before the PS goes to press, to the software I'm documenting were added: a new feature, a new menu (larger in scope than the new feature), two buttons, and a score of dialog boxes were revised and changed. After making these changes in the FrameMaker source, the online help took 15 minutes to update. 

Now, there are some outstanding numbers needed for a better comparison with the RoboHelp worflow, I need to sit down and total these, but this gives you an idea of where I am with this. 

Cheers, 

Sean 

P.S. You might be wondering why 552 pages or 1,800 topics are created from 650 pages, and what happens to the other stuff. Well, part of that is a style guide I built into the document that does not show up in the end-user deliverable, what I do is commented for the author, and I have documented the online help c-s topic management, and other such things. 

P.P.S. If you choose, with WebWorks, you can indeed automatically create thumbnails of graphics (50x50 pixels) in your text and have those thumbnails hyperlink to the full-blown image in the online help. In fact, one of the things I have done in previous projects, not this, was to create such hyperlink thumbnails only for images larger than a certain, user-defined, size.