On 7 Jul 2007 at 5:30, dhbailey wrote: > I simply asked Daniel why Sibelius had abandoned HTML in favor of PDF, > especially in light of MakeMusic's abandoning PDF in favor of HTML for > the help system in Fin2008. > > Daniel explained that the system they had been using to create HTML > help files had several problems with it: 1) it required the use of > Safari on Macs and IE on PCs and that wasn't changeable; and 2) it had > lousy customer support and had major bugs which weren't being > addressed after several years. > > When he said that about Safari and IE, I recalled the first complaints > about Fin2008 which said the help system required Safari for Macs and > IE for PCs and that the user couldn't change that. > > So I wouldn't say it's really a bug, but I would say it's a curiosity > that MakeMusic would appear to have adopted a tool which Sibelius > abandoned due to lousy customer support and lack of user option for > which browser to use to view it. > > I thought the PDF files worked just fine for Finale's On-Line > Documentation, and am bewildered as to why they would change.
Well, I, for one, have always intensely disliked the Adobe Reader -- the UI sucks and the whole concept is just wrong for onscreen reading. Print layouts work very, very poorly onscreen. Now, if Adobe Reader provided something like HTML CSS stylesheets, so you could have one for printing and one for onscreen viewing, that would be great. Or, of course, you could switch to HTML. >From what you and John have said about Daniel Spreadbury's comments, it seems that MM has chosen to use a third-party product for packaging documentation as HTML, instead of doing it themselves. I just can't see how it would be that difficult for good programmers to write their own converter, or code that would clean up, say, the HTML that MS Word creates. Of course, Microsoft screwed up in this regard, too, when they switched from plain old Windows help to HTML Help. As so many people said with that switch (which was first widely introduced in Office 2000), "HTML Help *needs* help!" The MS help format is very good if used correctly, but few companies other than MS themselves have managed to do it well, and MS didn't continue updating the tools for packaging help files, so it now looks old-fashioned. And, of course, WinHelp doesn't run at all on Vista for some strange reason. I think HTML is the ideal format for maintaining documentation, and lots of the open-source projects like PHP and MySQL have marvelous documentation hosted on websites that works just dandy and is easily searchable. I don't see why it would be so difficult to program an in- house database-driven website, with different stylesheets for printing and onscreen, and also have the website be able to package the individual articles into a single file (it's a programming problem, but not a big one at all). That in-house website could be used to produce static HTML documents for use with Finale, as well as allowing them to easily produce PDFs from the combined output source, using a print style sheet. But, apparently, they didn't have time to do it the right way, and bought a 3rd-party product to do it. One last comment: Daniel Spreadbury is, so far as I'm concerned, the biggest asset that Sibelius has. When we discussed Sib4's linked parts on this list, he responded personally to several of my comments, and was very open about acknowledging what Sibelius could and couldn't do in comparison to Finale. There was no ego there, no marketing, just plain old honesty about reality -- it was *very* refreshing. And he clearly knew Finale very, very well, not just superficially. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
