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Released 4 January 1998 

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Tip of the month is edited by Peter Ring, PRC (Peter Ring Consultants, Denmark)
- consultants on how to write user friendly manuals

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• More widespread use. Until a year or two ago, electronic media manuals almost didn't exist outside the Help files for computers and software. The only exceptions to this rules were heavy maintenance manuals (cars, aeroplanes, etc.) to be placed on the workshop's computer for easy search facilities, and quick and easy updates.


Today we see more and more companies publishing their paper manuals electronically in addition to (or - rarely - even replacing) the paper based manuals, either on the Internet or on CD-ROMs. The reasons are mainly ...

• To solve language problems. Wherever you are in the World, you can get the manual you need in any of the languages it is translated to. This solves ...
• the language problems for ethnic minorities (e.g. Turkish in Germany)
• the language problems for very international businesses like the shipping industry, where a captain of a British ship buys an equipment in Italy for to be used and maintained by his Philippine crew.
• the problems with the need for making the user un-friendly multi-language manuals.
• To distribute updates in a fast and cheap way, mainly via the Internet.

• Adobe Acrobat and RTF (Rich Text Format) gains ground as the "de facto" industry standards for different purposes:
• Over the past year we have seen a growing acceptance of the Adobe Acrobat format for electronic distribution of manuals. The reasons are primarily:
• Free readers for many software platforms.
• They can be "locked" as read only.
• They can be made by a few keystrokes when the paper based manual is ready. This is especially the case if the paper based manual has been written in FrameMaker or PageMaker.
• They can include internal and external clickable links. If made with programmes with suitable export facilities (e.g. FrameMaker and PageMaker) the internal and external links in these documents are preserved, and the automatically generated TOC (Table of Contents) and Index is automatically made clickable links.
• Adobe Acrobat files are increasingly used for distribution of proofreading copies.
• Good old RTF is gaining ground as a useful format for multi-platform exchange of editable documents including formatted text, tables, and graphics. It's not the perfect solution, but if you are careful when designing the document avoiding certain special effects it is often a good solution.

• Fight between HTML and the improved (e.g. Windows) Help as the dominating language for non-paper based manuals. Other competitors are Java and various multimedia formats.

• Writing manuals for complicated products to very different user groups (e.g. consumer electronics) has always been one of the big problems within technical writing. An acceptable - but not ideal - solution is multilevel-style, where you e.g. write the beginners' stuff in the style of cartoon with short assisting texts, the general user's stuff as cartoon with full text, and the advanced user's stuff as illustrated text.

• Print on demand is now close to become an economically acceptable solution. Experiments in 1997 has shown, that print on demand in some cases is only marginally more expensive than the ordinary "printed manuals on stock". The advantages of "print on demand" are ...
• Language problem solved. The customer can get the manual in the desired language(s) without getting maybe five other disturbing languages in the same manual.
• You can make dedicated customer-tailored manuals to the customers specific application or user level.

• Microsoft's reluctance to solve the problems in MS Word with long documents (incl. the still catastrophically bug-ridden Master Document feature) has opened the market for other solutions, and here Adobe FrameMaker more and more looks like the winner. It is generally considered somewhat more difficult to learn, and maybe also to use. There also seems to be problems with conversion to/from other formats, depending of how they are formatted. But it is known to be a stable programme, and it features colour separation and transfer of links to Adobe Acrobat files (see above).

If you disagree with these ideas - or have other relevant points, experiences, or ideas +/-, please e-mail me !

Ideas for new "Tip of the month" subjects are very welcome, too!

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