PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Company: Vantage Analysis Systems (a Viewlogic company)
Audience: Digital hardware designers
Length: About 1500 pages
Authoring Software: FrameMaker 3.1
Product: VantageSpreadsheet 5.0
Product Release Date: February 1994
Description: I was the lead writer for the project, and I coordinated the work of two writing consultants. In addition to writing, I integrated Adobe's FrameViewer document-viewing software into the company's online help system, which ran on six UNIX workstation platforms.
The document set described VantageSpreadsheet, which was a sophisticated simulator for VHDL (Very High-Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language). The set was the first-ever documentation that the company distributed online.
The company bundled FrameViewer with VantageSpreadsheet. Readers viewed the documents either by clicking the VantageSpreadsheet HELP button or by accessing a pop-up menu from the right mouse button. The document set had several thousand hypertext links and a navigation bar (which the writing group designed) on the bottom of each page. In addition to online distribution, the document set was published on paper in five volumes.
