Formatting Tips

Here are some things to watch for when you’re formatting a manual:

• If you are not a skilled word processor, you should probably not be doing the final formatting. If you are only preparing unformatted drafts, use as little formatting as possible.
  
  
• Use styles to format all standard text elements such as headings. Using styles not only promotes consistency in your formatting, it also lets you change tagged elements globally. Once elements have been tagged, you can change them simply by changing their style definitions.
  
  
• Use the header/footer feature of your word processor—don’t create your own headers/footers at the top/bottom of each text page. If you have to add or subtract text later, they will move with the text and you’ll have to reposition them.
  
  
• Don’t use hard spaces (the space produced when you press the space bar) to centre or position text. It just doesn’t work.
  
  
• For hanging indents (indents where each subsequent line uses the same indent as the first line), use indents rather than tabs. This bulleted list, for example, uses a single indent after the bullet to ‘hang’ the remaining lines.
  
  
• Don’t use hard returns to create page breaks. If you use hard returns, they’ll affect the spacing if the page break moves.
  
  
• Don’t finalize your page breaks, table of contents, and index until you’ve finalized the rest of the manual.