re: Concordia-likeness, etc.

[s9274@srl1.LANL.GOV]

    Imagine you want to maintain both large flowchart diagrams and text that
    goes with them, explaining how to interpret the diagrams. You want to
    maintain the text in one place in your organization, but be able to
    print it out as a book/document. Having on-line hypertext access, both for
    maintainers and reviewers and users is also what you want (otherwise all
    you need is PageMaker, right?) 
    
    First question: is there anything like this running on the MAC and/or
    IBMs? The costs may prevent doing this with full Concordia and the
    Ivory, though that would be preferred. I need to know if there is any
    possibility at all.

FrameMaker is looking better and better for development and delivery of
documents on "standard" platforms. What you stand to lose by abandoning
Genera, however, is a close interaction between your existing flowchart
editor and the accompanying procedures.
    
    Second, you want to be able to reference parts of the flowcharts from
    the text/hyptertext document, so you can maintain one copy of the
    diagrams. I can imagine hacking something between Concordia and our
    WYSIWYG flowchart editor, but what would it be like to do that with MAC
    or IBM software?

I presume you mean here "what would it take to make hooks between the
document development software and the flowchart editor once the latter
had been converted to CLIM." My impresssion is that we are spoiled by
having access to so much source code in Genera, and that such a task
would be a formidable one.

Depending on your customer's requirements, your best option may be to
stick with your flowchart editor and the documentation substrate in
Genera.

John Krieger (s9274@srl1.lanl.gov)
Westinghouse Savannah River Company