Links in flowchart/VISIO/PDF/Dreamweaver 1

[leswin1]

We are creating a system for viewing and tracking part and document lifecycle.

We would like to make all areas of the process available for viewing and make some training exercises too.

The final product will be put on our website. We will use Dreamweaver.

We are sort of making it up as we go. I am a writer. We also have engineers and web design people involved.

We would welcome input/advice from people who have done something similar.

I will try to describe what we need and what we have done so far.

Maybe there is a better way. Please let us know if you have advice.

Greatly appreciated.

Les Winberg

The purpose of the system is to make all aspects of the part creation and documentation process viewable via a flow chart system that can be linked to relevant documentation. – You could click on the box of interest in the flow and it would take you to the subject documentation. In this documentation, you could drill down/access more detailed information.

We would like to know the best way to set this up i.e. Software, etc.

We would also like to know methods for navigation and jumping around inside the system instead of having to click to and from each level.

So far we have:

We have created flowcharts in VISIO

Saved flowcharts as PDF

Created definition documents in Word

Saved them as Webpage and PDF

We have:

Selected flowchart boxes for hyper-linking in the PDF document

Inserted hyperlinks by linking to the index link of the web page we made by saving the original Word document of our definitions.

Steps

Click chain in ADOBE PDF

Drag box around box foe intended link

Link prop box appears

Select invisible

In type, select

http://wwwLink

Go to webpage TOC link

Right click

Copy shortcut

Return to flow and paste shortcut in Edit URL dialog box




PLEASE OFFER ADVICE.

 

[rvnguy]

leswin1,

A fairly complex question for a single post. As there are many ways to assemble what you are looking to accomplish I will have to try to extract from your sparse posted information some items that may or may not be of assistance.

Dreamweaver is generally considered to be a CSS type of Web writing aid/generator. Most of the other items, ViSio included will write basic HTML for pages you create. Your Web designers can alter these to align with CSS fairly simply.
As I don't know what your audience is, I would suggest for the Lay and tech crowds, that the more graphical you can maintain the interface the more it will get utilized. Graphical interfaces tend to be more intuitive if well thought out on the frontend.

You seem to be taking steps that I would have included in the ViSio environment. You may have good reasons for this or might not know that you can accomplish it in ViSio.

Selected flowchart boxes for hyper-linking in the PDF document

Are you aware that you can generate these links in ViSio and use 'save as' HTML to create the page and bypass the PDF creation and subsequent linking.

A possible with the basic process info you provided:

Chart of overall process:
Sub divide process into major functions, 2 to ?? divisions
Hot link “Overall” process diag to diags of sub-proccess
Either further sub division of major functions into sub-sub-functions or provide links to things like part view, part specification(could be further broken into Dimension Spec, Mat’l Spec, Performance Spec, etc).

Much depends upon how complex the process is that you are trying to define and document.

Hope that there is some insight that you can use here or that you continue this post with your progress.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[ISOConsultant]

Hi,

Further to the above reply if you are using Visio 2003 you can generate your process charts using Visio with hyperlinks between the pages and then publish the whole document as a web.

 

[leswin1]

Thanks everyone. I see that my post is long and vague. I will try to improve.

LesWin