CompuServe Messages

I haven't used one of the commercial packages you mention for generating a hypertext cd-rom, but i have created several cdrom hypertext titles. Actually, the titles i have worked on are more of a cross between hypertext and conventional text retrieval. The disks are those produced by Xiphias and do full text inversion on the source material. When using a product, any word on the screen is hot (instead of just specfic, manually authored links). Clicking a word runs a conventional index search and gives a list of articles that contain the word. Recent titles (Grolier's for CDTV Version 2) ranks the articles by # of occurances of the word. I understand Windows has a tool very similar to this, but also allows manual links. The benifit of Full Text Inversion is that many relevant links are created automatically. The problem is that there are many irrelevant links also created. Depending on your product, those 'irrelevant' links can actually be very interesting for browsing. Straight hypertext tools often require LOTS of manual editorial work to generate the (hi quality) links. I'm also not sure how their file layout would translate to CD. (how many disk seeks are required, etc) Jerry Isdale