8   Writing and Production Software

Formatting Tips

Print Manuals

Here are some tips on word processing your print manual:

• If you are not a skilled word processor, you should probably not be doing the final formatting. If you are preparing unformatted drafts, use as little formatting as possible.

• Use styles to format all standard text elements such as headings or changes in line spacing. 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.

• Don’t change the styles within a section without making the change to the template. Changing the style in the template will affect all sections of the manual that use that template.

• Put each section of the manual in a separate word processor file. Unless you have a fast computer with lots of processing power, large files will be slow to work with and may cause your computer to crash. However, before you can generate an automated table of contents or index or update cross-references, you must either join the files together or create a master document that includes them.

• Use the header/footer feature of your word processor—don’t create your own false headers/footers at the top/bottom of each text page. If you have to add or subtract text later, false headers/footers 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. Use tabs or indents, or change the margins. Or create a table to help position text elements.

• For hanging indents (indents where each subsequent line uses the same indent as the first line), use indents rather than tabs. This list, for example, uses a single indent after the bullet to ‘hang’ the remaining lines.

• Don’t use hard returns (extra line spaces) to create page breaks. If you do, you’ll have to manually find and remove them if the text changes.

• Don’t finalize your page breaks or generate the table of contents and index until you’ve finalized the text.

Online Manuals

Here are some tips on word processing your online manual:

• Create a master document containing all sections of your manual (see the information on master documents).

• Within your master document, create separate files for the title page, generated table of contents, and generated index.

• Set up automated entries for the table of contents, index, and cross-references (see the information on using your word processor’s automated features).

• Use styles to format the text and graphics. Don’t hard format anything—the conversion software will not pick up formatting that isn’t included in the style.

• Don’t use hard returns (extra line spaces) to add space—add the extra spacing to the appropriate style.

• Manage the styles you set up—don’t let your list get too big or out of control.

• Create separate styles for numbered, bulleted, and lettered lists.

• Set up playscript procedures as tables (see the information on playscript procedures).