I had a bunch of things to do yesterday, one of which was to write this blog. Another was to write a report for my boss. In turns out that doing the latter has given me inspiration for the former. I’m talking about navigating through documents.

We “knowledge workers” spend a great deal of time sifting through documents of one sort or another. We pick our way through websites, articles, reports, datasheets, manuals, spreadsheets gleaning the information we need and often creating yet another document. Hopefully, adding some value along the way with the expertise that we bring to the selection and presentation of the information, our insights and conclusions.

This information gathering process is non-linear, and well suited to the computer screen where you can have multiple windows open and move freely between them. I’ve blogged previously (see “Guiding Principles” ) about creating documents that are easy for the recipient to consume – by which I mean, easy to read, navigate through, and find the information they need.

So why return to this subject? The reason is an observation I made of a relative of mine who was trying to find out how to set up a new TV, ready for the World Cup. The device arrived with no printed manual, but a CD-ROM with the manuals for numerous languages in PDF. “What do I do with this?” was his first question. Although I was there and could have done the job in no time, I decided to see how well this relative (we’ll call him Bill) could cope with using gDoc Fusion which I had previously installed on his slightly ancient computer.

The CD-ROM was well laid out in terms of folders but there was no welcome screen or menu. Without some prompting from me Bill would never have found the English manual. Once he’d done so, I stepped back to watch how he got on. With the document on screen, he began to page through it, but I could tell he wasn’t comfortable.

In the “real” world, design, layout and typography and the conventions of the written word provide the structure. A table of contents at the front, an index at the back and so on. Had he been reading a physical document, Bill would have relied on these conventions alone, but once in the context of a computer screen, Bill expected more. He assumed the document content itself would guide him, in the manner of a web page, and although he successfully navigated around the document with the usual keys (he’s not keen on the mouse) he thought it could have been easier.

Bill as you can probably tell is not an expert user, and it reminded me that there remains a divide between documents designed for the printed page and those designed for the screen. As software developers we have to find ways to make documents that were not designed for the screen easier to view, navigate and search in that environment. Authors need to consider their audience and create material suited to their needs. In this case, the TV manufacturer could have presented the manual in HTML or as a landscape PDF with lots of hyperlinks. Nor is it an either/or situation – there are plenty of authoring environments that support this type of multi-channel output from a single source.

By the way, Bill succeeded in tuning his new TV, but after England’s performance was not sure it was worth it!

With the release of gDoc Fusion 2.5, we introduced a new capability, to display and convert well over 200 file types – word processing, spreadsheet, graphic and image formats. Many are “legacy” formats – outdated file formats from applications that were once popular, maybe even the “de facto” standards of their day, such as Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect on DOS.

gDoc Fusion also converts contemporary formats such as DOCX, XLXS & PPTX, and it does all these conversions without the need for the application to be installed.

Why support all these legacy formats? gDoc Fusion is all about assembly of documents from multiple sources. It’s also about getting to the information locked inside documents. For some requirements, this capability is vital. One is e-discovery, defined by www.lexbe.com as “the collection, preparation, review and production of electronic documents in litigation discovery”. Because of the pace of software development, it is not unusual for vital evidence to be contained in obsolete file formats; multi-format viewing and conversion then becomes a necessity, not a luxury.

The multi-format capability offered by gDoc Fusion is unusual in a desktop software product. It’s more usually the domain of enterprise-level (read expensive) document management or systems aimed at a specific vertical market such as legal case management. gDoc Fusion also offers the “traditional” PDF creation method of printing to a virtual printer, adding hundreds more applications that can generate a PDF.

The question that naturally arises is “OK, I’ve converted my documents, but what’s to say the converted document is going to be any longer lived?” The answer is that the industry has recognised this problem, and has developed international standards for electronic document archival based on PDF, i.e. PDF/A. Moreover, the nature of PDF means that it can remain part of a live, searchable archive that’s easy to print or even convert back to an authoring format. gDoc Fusion supports saving documents in PDF/A.

Of course, the hardware changes too. The rapid development of storage media poses an altogether different challenge to CIOs who must also consider migration of the data itself to prevent it being locked on media for which no hardware exists to read it. At least there is an answer for the file formats themselves.