Wow. Lot's of responses to this! I'll try to answer a few of the replies. > >The easy solution is to just publish them as PDFs, but that just > doesn't > >seem to be the elegant solution in my mind. > > Can I ask why?
Well, I don't like the idea of storing content as a PDF. I understand the content could still be stored in a structured manner, and then exported as PDF, and if there is a tool that can accomplish this, with no more effort required on the author's end then what they do now (type it in word), I think it'd be a good solution. >Question: how are the documents edited? Word? Framemaker? Word. >If that doesn't pan out, I would just go to PDF. If you need to >distribute >only changed pages, you may find there are PDF tools available >even if >there are none specific to the original format. Actually, once they're published, they're done. No need to edit them. However, It'd be nice to repurpose them so that they can be searched, formatted for different devices (PDAs), summarized, etc. >Some question that I would ask are how many pages are we talking >about here? Each document averages 5 to 15 pages, with, at most, 30 or so documents published a week. >The problem of Austin as far as I understood (if not then I'm rising >another problem for witch a solution is require) is how to maintain the >same pagination information/setup among multiple devices (paper, HTML, >PDA, etc)? Good question Nuno...thanks for asking. At first, I thought that wasn't the case, but now that you mentioned it, yes...we would want the pagination info consistent across all of the mediums. So, if you are referencing 'page 3', 'page 3' will be labeled in the same spot on all devices. When printing, of course, each page should correlate to a real printed page, but in the browser or PDA, a simple visual divider would suffice (ie, END PAGE 1, START PAGE 2...) >PDF-ing the pages doesn't seem like it will gain you much >here, since you're not necessarily interested in keeping a physical >representation of the original page. The only thing I need to retain is the amount of content on each pyhysical page. If one is printed in helvetica, the other in times, it is irrelevant, but both pages must contain the exact content. After reading all of the responses, it certainly appears that there are some CMS solutions out there, but I fear than they will all complicate the author's task by some degree. So, with that said, I do think going from Word -> PDF and then applying some meta information when uploaded is perhaps the way to go for us. -Darrel -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
