RE: Customers who read manuals from cover to cover

["Glenn Maxey" <glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com>]

> Warren wrote:
> 
> ++++
> 
> The tendency in our company was to undermine the value of 
> documentation, by claiming that "nobody ever reads them anyway." 
> All this changed when a high-level delegation went to visit an 
> important customer in Japan, and found out that they have a 
> team of engineers, who sit with 
> marking pens and go through every word in the manuals, 
> underlining parts they don't understand or which aren't clear.
>
> ++++

Not just the Japanese. I once had a Swedish co-worker who convinced me
to make a major change to the help system because he -- among other
excellent engineers -- liked to read software documentation from
beginning to end.

The change that he effected was a single browse-sequence that hits all
topics within the help file. _Most_ pop-up topics had to be excluded
(because the non-scrolling region banner doesn't exist), but everybody
knows that I hate pop-ups anyway :). I minimized my use of pop-up's to
definitions and put some "smart" controls on the browse sequences.
(Definitions that appear as pop-ups could also be browsed, but only
after all other topics so that the missing non-scrolling region didn't
jar readers and looked/was planned.)

Nowadays, all help systems -- WinHelp or HTML -- that I create have a
means to let the reader page through the documentation from beginning to
end, if they want to. I'm sure that having this capability has increased
the number of explorers who land on a topic and then go forward and
backward a few pages from there. It apalls me the number of help systems
that don't allow this kind of browsing.

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