Concordia-like system on the MAC or IBM --- hypertext + desktop publishing question]

[CStacy@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Christopher Stacy)]

    Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1992 10:06 EST
    From: Paul Pangaro <pan@ATHENA.PANGARO.dialnet.symbolics.com>

    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.

    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? 

    any help gratefully received, thanks

Paul,

The Symbolics Document Examiner for the Macintosh might be a possible solution.

This is a hypertext delivery system for Symbolics Concordia.
It has a graphical browser, book marks, mouse sensitivity, indexing
and keyword searches, and more.  The Mac DocEx runs on the Mac II
family of computers (without an Ivory board) with 1MB (2MB if you are
using MultiFinder) and a hard disk; it's AppleShare compatible.
The user interface is Macintosh standard, with the regular menus and
so forth, printing is supported, and the program includes online help.

You author your documents using full Concordia on a Symbolics machine.
(By the way, Concordia can include PICT files in documents, should you
want to use some Mac drawing program.)  A program called Producer
converts your document into to a form suitable for use by the
Macintosh Document Examiner.

Alcoa uses this system at their Tennessee Works for documenting their
continuous cold rolling mill.  Electricians, engineers, mechanics,
operators, and supervisors are users.  The documents are over 10,000
hardcopy pages long (about 100 feet of shelf space), and includes
text, tables, flowcharts, and engineering drawings and pictures.

Cheers,
Chris