Lesson 8: The Tools of the Trade
Generating electronic documentation
HTML and PDF are the two most common formats used for electronic documentation. Although you can distribute PDF files meant for printers electronically, most people choose to make hyperlinks active and add a table of contents to the PDF file first. This involves a few changes to the Distiller settings and some minor editing to the resulting PDF files.
The last few versions of FrameMaker have included a "Save as HTML" option but frankly it's not yet up to snuff. The generated HTML has a lot of problems and needs quite a bit of editing before it looks nice enough to send to customers. While this quick and dirty HTML generation is wonderful for internal reviews and beta testing, most people choose to use Quadralay WebWorks to generate HTML for actual release to customers.
Quadralay isn't perfect either, but it's a more robust option than the simple FrameMaker HTML conversion. Quadralay works by mapping available page elements - headings, tables, footers, code samples, and the like - to an appropriate HTML tag. For instance, first level headings in your Frame files will generally be placed between <H1> tags in the resulting HTML. Not all mappings are so obvious, and Quadralay lets you choose exactly how each element is converted. You could, for instance, choose to start a new page for each first level heading rather than assign them as <H1>. Quadralay also automatically generates next and previous links for each page as well as a table of contents.
