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RE: Do Users Refer to a Table of Figures?

Subject: RE: Do Users Refer to a Table of Figures?
From: Win Day <winday -at- home -dot- com>
To: Karen Field <kfield -at- STELLCOM -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 21:50:37 -0500

At 04:02 PM 3/7/00 -0800, Karen Field wrote:

<<My experience suggests that a good index and table of contents are far
more
useful, and that for most users, a table of figures is just a waste of trees
and bytes.>>

Connie,
I agree completely. I can't image a user looking up a figure in a table of
figures. If they had questions about a dialog box, for example, they'd
probably look up the dialog box name in the index, where there might
subentries for the d-box such as "explained" or "using to print files" or
whatever.

Not everyone writes software documents, though. I write a lot of engineering project reports, reports that are generally not indexed. There are times when someone wants to find the PFD (that's Process Flow Diagram, not PDF) of, say, the depropanizer. The engineers will turn to the list of figures.

So the answer is, as usual, it depends.

Win
-----------------
Win Day
Technical Writer

http://www.wordsplus.net

mailto:winday -at- wordsplus -dot- net

http://members.home.net/winday/index.html




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