Converting Documents to Hypertext

Link both inside and outside your document

When your customers use paper documents, they may have been referred to places inside the same chapter, document, or other documents. If they were fortunate, the references included the page numbers (for references inside the document) or chapter (for references outside the document) to make it easier for the customer to look at what you were talking about.

With hypertext, customers can click and go directly to the part of the document you are referring to. But it means you'll have to set up all those internal links and maintain them.

I found that setting up links was one of the hardest and most time-consuming conversion activities. Along with places that the document already referred to, I went through the document, looking for "linking" opportunities that may not have been "exploited" in the paper version and re-wrote some text to take advantages of those opportunities. These opportunities included linking to items in the glossary and the appendices.