More Documentation Planning Issues? Yes!

In the last few articles, we have looked at many of the issues associated with planning your user documentation. We’ve covered how to analyze your audience, plan your document structure, design your page layout, and choose your writer. Well, you’re not finished planning yet. You also have to decide what tools to use to create the manual.

In looking at the tools, you need to consider how you are going to reproduce your manual. This may affect your choice of software and hardware, especially your output device (printer). The size of the manual (both page size and number of pages) and binding method will also affect these decisions. See, I told you that there were more planning issues. We’ll talk about each of these areas briefly.

Some of these issues may seem like the chicken and the egg; it’s hard to know which comes first. I suggest that you consider the look of the final product and the image you want to project. Once you know that, you can work backwards to make the other decisions. If you are documenting a system used only within your company, it is likely that your budget is limited. Since you are not trying to make a good impression on paying customers, you may want to use the photocopying facilities available in your company to reproduce the manual. That decision would lead you to use 8 1/2" x 11" pages and an inexpensive binding method. If three-ring binders are commonly used already, that may be your best and least expensive choice.

If you are writing a manual for a commercial product to be sold to the public, you will probably want to have the copies made by a printing company. You will need to talk with various printers to learn about the variety of options they offer. Most commercial software manuals use smaller page sizes. That way they are easier to use while you are at the computer. A big binder with
8 1/2" x 11" pages can be a bit unwieldy when you are trying to juggle it, your keyboard (and possibly a mouse), and still see your computer screen. Pages that are 7" x 9" are fairly common and much easier for your users to handle.

You’ll want to talk with your printer about binding options as well. Software manuals can be in small three-ring binders (a good option if you plan to send customers periodic updates), spiral bound with plastic or metal coil (note that these generally don’t have a spine to label the book, making it harder to find on a bookshelf), or bound with a paperback cover. A small paperback manual may be bound very simply with staples in the middle. A larger manual can be perfect bound just like any other paperback book.

Your printer can explain these options to you, show you samples, and give you prices. Once you have narrowed down the choices that are feasible for your project, you should get bids from at least two or three different printers and compare not only cost, but also quaility, reputation, and speed.

Now that you have made those decisions, or at least narrowed down your choices, you can look more closely at the software and hardware to be used. If you are doing an in-house photocopying job, what you choose won’t make much difference. If your software and hardware can produce the format and fonts you have chosen, you are ready to go.

You may want to look at how easily your software will handle such things as graphics (especially if you plan to use screen shots from the system) and headers or footers that change with chapters or sections. Today’s word processing packages can create headers or footers, but they may not easily generate page numbers that list both the chapter and page (for example Page 2-3, for page three of chapter two) or cross references with page numbers that cross different files. If you want to use those formats, you may want to look a desktop publishing package that can ususally handle such things.

If you are going to send the manual to a printer for reproduction, be sure to find out what type of output is required. Some printers may be able use an electronic copy on disk depending on what software was used. Others will want a hard copy. You need to see if output from a 300 dpi laser printer will be good enough. For the best results, you may need to use 600 dpi printer or higher. Be sure you know what you must provide before you start to write.

Your software choices will also depend upon whether you plan to do updates and who will do them. If you will do updates yourself, but you are using a contractor to write the manual initially, be sure the writer’s tools are compatible with your own.

Now we have covered most of the planning issues you need to address. Of course, we have just scratched the surface of each of these topics and we haven’t even mentioned artwork for the cover, how updates will be handled, or how you’ll distribute the documentation. I hope this gives you some idea of what you need to create a good manual. You’ll need to do your homework in each of the areas I have mentioned in this article and in the previous four to do a really good job. In the next article we’ll leave the planning behind and look at other documentation issues.