Jim Liebert wrote:
As an aside - Compuware is currently "surveying" their customers as to
whether to keep books in pdf/bookmanager/html format(s). So if you're a
Compuware site you can log onto Frontline (the tech support site) and vote
for your favorite. I vote retain BookManager!
Sounds to me like someone is getting lazy.
Once things are set up, it takes almost no additional effort to maintain
three formats than it does just one. Acrobat is the most expensive and
time consuming format to create (assuming you want to preserve both the
internal links and the understanding of what "text" is for search purposes).
I never actually quantified this before. To provide input to this
discussion, I just now timed the creation of "(E)JES Reference" in all
three formats. The results are as follows:
M$ Word "Save as Web Page" 0:10
BookManager BUILD (2.3 for Windows) 1:15
Create Adobe PDF using PDFMaker 15:30
HTML is obviously the quickest format to create. Ten seconds is trivial.
Acrobat is the "killer" at 15 1/2 minutes. (BTW, the PDF was built
*without* the accessibility tags. Tagging the PDF takes even longer.) At
only one 1 and 1/4 minutes, building the BookManager softcopy format
should be no big deal. Put another way, building the PDF document takes
almost 11 times longer than the total, combined time required to build
the other two formats.
These number come from my "slow" computer at home (Intel Pentium 4 CPU
3.40GHz (XE) w/1GB 400MHz PC3200 RAM and a pair of 160GB 7200RPM SATA
disk drives). It would likely run faster on my desktop PC at work and
slower on my Thinkpad T41 laptop. But I suspect the ratios between the
various techniques will remain fairly constant.
Am I missing something? What rationale exists for desupporting *any* of
these formats? In particular, and in light of IBM's recent launch of
Library Server for z/OS, AIX, Linux, and Windows (see
http://www.ibm.com/software/info/ecatalog/en_US/products/M108005P76786E06.html
and http://www.ibm.com/software/applications/office/bkmgr/librsrvrzos/),
why would any ISV be dropping support for the BookManager softcopy format?
--
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| Edward E. Jaffe | |
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