Good page design not only enhances the visual appeal of your manual, but improves its legibility—readers will be able to locate information on the page faster using skimming and scanning techniques, and once they start to read, will read the text faster.
Many of the page design and typographic conventions that we still see in use in manuals today evolved because of the limitations imposed by typewriters (such as putting two spaces after a period instead of one). Now that we use sophisticated word processors and laser printers, we need to ‘unlearn’ some of these typewriter conventions and go back to standard typographic conventions.
This chapter looks at the design and layout of manual pages including:
For page designs that you can use for your modular manual, see Appendix C. There are three designs to choose from: one for chapter-level modules, one for 2nd-level modules, and one for 3rd-level modules. In Appendix C there are word processor templates available to download for each of these page designs. Templates are provided in Word for the Macintosh, Microsoft Word for Windows and WordPerfect. Each one includes format codes, headers and footers, and heading styles.
