Usinig HTML for a user manual.

[orphans]

Hi folks,

We have complex manuals that tell clients how to fill out the forms needed for an international adoption. For the first time we went digital with a manual, saving a couple of trees in the process. We put it together like a website, and just email the folders to our clients.

It is pretty simple, the client clicks on the index.html file. It opens up a table of contents. They click on one of 8 sections. That takes them to an html document with instructions on how to fill out each type of form. Then there are buttons that open the forms. The forms are all Word documents that use the Forms option, so the clients can just type in their name, address, birthdate, etc. They hit print, and can mail off their form.

All of the machines in our shop are XP. I sent the first copy of this to a Vista user. The manual/local website opened right up. When she tried to click on a button to open a word document it told her that her security settings were wrong.

Why on earth is vista objecting to a hyperlink from one file on the hard drive to a Word file in a different folder on the same hard drive? I want to put this together so that Vista users can just have it open up and run.

We used Office 2003 to put this together, including FrontPage (Hey, it was easy, no grousing, I know it makes the html fat) and Word.

Any suggestions?

Dave

[dharrison]

Hi dave

I'm on Vista and FireFox 3.0.2 and I have just managed to open the Americans Adopting Orphans Family Application Form from my Vista Platform with no issues.

It sounds more likely an issue with Word itself. What version of Word is your customer using?

A workaround is to convert all your forms from .doc format to .pdf format. Adobe Acrobat is a much more universal format for web documents and you don't have to worry about what certain revision of Word your customer's are using. I will gladly talk you through this if you need help.

HTH

[orphans]

The problem is not on our webpage, it is on this manual that we designed as a web page, but are not placing on the page. We are just sending it as files to our clients.

So they get a Folder called Step 1. They open that and they see index.html and a bunch of folders like forms, instructions, images. We tell them to just double click on index.html, and that opens up the table of contents in their browser, but the files are all local on their PC in the "Step 1" folder that we emailed to them. So while we used web page software, it isn't actually out there.

That's what is so crazy about Vista (or maybe the version of IE that they are using) not liking the security of the web page. All of the files are right there as subfolders of the folder containing the index page. It apparently really doesn't like opening up a .doc file.

Of course the client can just navigate through WINDOWS explorer to the folder labeled FORMS and see the list of all 20 forms. But that's not how I want it to work. I want them to be reading instructions, see a button, click the button, and have that open up the Word document.

I was hoping that this was a known/common bug/problem, and I could give her some simple setting, or that I could do some simple thing on my files, to make this all user friendly.

It is always the easiest little projects that cause problems.

This was supposed to be a snap. Just take my existing Word instruction documents, use word itself to save them as html files. Open them up in Front Page, add a couple of buttons, and email the package off to the folks. <sigh>

Dave

[orphans]

Oh, and the reason we used Word was because all of the documents already WERE in word. We have acrobat Pro, but found the forms fill out function to be very awkward. Near as I could figure out Adobe took an image of the document, and we had to build little boxes for people to use to fill in the forms. The size of the space was not dynamic. If all we wanted to do was give them printable documents, pdf's would have been our first choice. But when we wanted to take existing documents, turn them into filloutable forms, and leave them in a configuration that most of our clients would already have seen, then Word made more sense to us.

Dave

[wige]

This is not a Word issue, it is an Internet Explorer 7 issue, as far as I have seen. I have encountered it before, where the security settings of IE7 are by default set so that a local document can not "execute" another document. Even running JavaScript in a local .js file from a web page on your computer would trigger a warning. There is a code that you can add to the top of the page so that it will execute local scripts. Unfortunately, it has been a very long time since I have dealt with this issue, and I no longer have that code. Another member might have that information though.

[orphans]

Huh. That sounds like what I have encountered. Well, at least I know what the culprit is. I am running IE7 on my xp machine, and it is opening the word docs in a window withing IE, which creates interesting issues with the toolbars and the header. Back to the drawing board.

If anybody comes up with the code, plz let me know.

Dave