WebWorks Publisher 2003 for Word
Summary | Starting a project | Customisation and tweaking | Other points
WebWorks Publisher 2003 for Word is the second release of this single-source authoring tool from Quadralay. At the same time, Quadralay have also released WebWorks Publisher 2003 for FrameMaker, a more established tool that had previously reached version 6. With WebWorks Publisher for Word—I'll call it Publisher for the remainder of this article—you can convert the contents of your Microsoft Word documents to a variety of online formats When you need to update your publications, you make all your changes in the Word documents and then generate new versions of the online formats.
After several weeks of experiments, I find Publisher both powerful and flexible. It provides a set of standard templates that make certain aspects of single-sourcing very simple. However to become an expert with this tool, you need to invest a significant amount of time to understand the wealth of options available to you. If you want total control over your projects, someone in your organisation will need to learn the Publisher macro language. Although Publisher hides some aspects of the generation process behind a graphic interface, other aspects are more exposed. To customise some features of your online files, you need to edit various text files used in the generation process.
Publisher is competing with some well-established help-authoring tools. Other tools are simpler to use, but Publisher comes into its own when you need full control over the appearance of both printed and online publications. Also, Publisher supports a wider range of output formats than its competitors. To encourage users of other tools to migrate to Publisher (for Word or FrameMaker), Quadralay offers Import Utility 1.0, which can convert RoboHelp projects, compiled HTML files, or sets of HTML files to Word or FrameMaker formats.
Even if you don't need to invest in single-source development, you might find Publisher useful for one-off conversions of important Word files. It produces cleaner HTML than some other conversion tools, and it provides numerous ways to tweak individual graphics, tables, and other elements.
Both Publisher and the Import Utility are available from the Quadralay web site for free evaluation.
Summary (top) | Starting a project | Customisation and tweaking | Other points
Copyright © 2003 Stephen P. Reynolds. All rights reserved.
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