Writing Documents For Paper And WWW

A strategy based on FrameMaker and WebMaker

Programming Techniques Group,
CERN, ECP Division,
CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

The interest in having high quality maintainable versions of a document in both paper and WWW formats is growing dramatically as WWW is fast becoming the most important way of browsing and delivering information on the Internet.

This paper discusses the strategy based on FrameMaker, a desktop publishing package from Frame Technology Corporation, and the configurable translator WebMaker, written by the authors, for the simultaneous production of paper and WWW versions of a document. Advantages of this scheme are the WYSIWIG FrameMaker interface, easily maintainable WWW documents, and the possibility to obtain a WWW version of already existent Frame documents by simply supplying configuration information for their conversion.

The introduction provides some background information and outlines the strategy. The second section is a comparison of the two formats, feature by feature, outlining the behavior of WebMaker for each feature. The third section focuses on WebMaker and discusses the general user requirements and the WWW document generation process. The WebMaker configuration language is briefly discussed. The fourth section presents a list of recommendations for writers as a guideline for the simultaneous preparation of both the paper and WWW documents. A few words on future directions is given at the end.

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