Print or Online for Learning

No one prints the documentation and yet, in this digital world, there are articles like this one - The enduring power of print for learning in a digital world - that question that premise. It is the debate that will last forever within the technical writing profession. I have confronted it at all but one of every technical writing job I've ever had.

1. At NDP (my first job), it was not an issue as we distributed hard-copy documentation in binders.
2. At Jordan Systems (my second job), I used Doc-to-Help to create both a WinHelp file as well as a Word document.
3. At Quintrex, I used RoboHelp to have the content in both online Help as well as in a PDF.
4. At the unnamed hellhole in southern Iowa, there was no online Help for the system I documented. Instead, as I've bitched about many times before on this blog, InDesign was the tool of choice. I questioned whether using a tool like RoboHelp (or any HAT) to generate an online version of the help system was an avenue worth pursuing. The idea was rejected.
5. At Pearson, we transitioned from authoring in MS Word and distributing PDFs to authoring and posting our online Help on a Confluence site. 
6. At the University, where I work now, I use RoboHelp to create both a browser-based version of my documentation as well as a PDF. 

From my perspective, because I am linking to files within the browser-based version, a PDF version is unnecessary as content from the following list of file types are linked to in the browser-based version and not actually within the RoboHelp project:

1. *.csv
2. *.jpg
3. *.png
4. *.ppt
5. *.pptx
6. *.pdf
7. *.txt
8. *.vsd
9. *.vsdx
10. *.vsdm
11. *.xls
12. *.xlsx
13. *.zip

In order to get the content from those file types into my RoboHelp project, there would be a hamster wheel of converting from [original file type] to [MS Word] and then linking to the MS Word document. However, when there was a change made to the original file, the process would have to restart. It would never be caught up and it would be repetitive and mind-numbing work. Thus, no.