Re: Press this, or just Press

["Mike Starr" <mike -at- writestarr -dot- com>]

And sometimes when the company style guide imposes arbitrary limitations 
that were created without anticipating situations like you describe I don't 
hesitate to ignore the style guide and create a document that actually 
serves the user instead of conforming to a standard that would result in a 
crappy and difficult-to-maintain document. But then again, I've never been 
afraid to get fired over resisting stupidity.

However, for those less secure in their career, why not take the content and 
create an alternative version of a couple pages as a proof-of-concept?

Mike
--
Mike Starr                            WriteStarr Information Services
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----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kathleen MacDowell" <kathleen -at- writefortheuser -dot- com>
> Subject: Re: Press this, or just Press
>
> I didn't send out the original question, I just sent a comment.
>
> Right now I'm writing a user's guide for a universal remote with a touch
> screen and hard buttons. The remote controls up to 10 devices. So it does
> have a GUI, but lots of different screens. Often, both the buttons and
> touch-screen keys are used to accomplish a task. It can be complex.
>
> We don't know that the materials we're producing will be translated, but
> the decision was made to set them up as if they would be. I didn't make 
> the
> decision and generally prefer to have the information in the figure. But
> there are trade-offs, such as having an overly busy figure/multiple
> figures. There are alternative approaches that would make layout easier,
> such as inline figures, but the company templates don't allow for that.
> Finally, most of the products in the line I'm working on are fairly small 
> (3
> x 5 in.), and the installation materials are in an A5 layout, so the 
> figures
> can't have too much content. 

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