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Thanks to everyone who has provided input; at this point, I'm leaning
toward landscape.
-Robert asked how the guide would be distributed / bound (if print).-
*The guide will be a user-printable .pdf; it will be made available to
them electronically. If they decide to print it, they'll use office
printers. It won't be professionally bound.*
-Jan suggested orienting just the pages with wide screenshots and
callouts as landscape, while leaving the rest of the document in
portrait.-
-Paul mentioned that he recalled seeing portrait... and then landscape
in an old IBM manual.-
*I'm not sure if I want to alternate between portrait and landscape,
mainly because I'd like to spare the user the annoyance of having to
rotate individual pages. Does anyone else have experience with
alternating between landscape and portrait? Did it cause problems?
Alternating is still an option.*
-Kathleen suggested taking into account the difficulty and criticality
of the steps I'm describing.-
*The tasks that have the wide screenshots with callouts entail analyzing
the on-screen information before proceeding to subsequent tasks.
They're not difficult tasks in and of themselves, but without
understanding *all of* the data that's presented on the screen, users
will be unable to carry out any subsequent tasks. (So in that sense, I
guess that they're not difficult, but they ARE critical.)*
-Claudine mentioned that she used FrameMaker to create master pages with
content flows going from one page to another. She also used landscape
for tables.-
*Unfortunately, I'm stuck with Word for the time being, but regardless,
I don't feel comfortable splitting images across two pages right now. I
realize that they can view .pdf pages side-by-side on-screen, but if
they opt to print the document themselves, they're likely to bust out
the heavy-duty stapler and plant one in the upper left. If I was
binding it myself, or if we were having it professionally bound, I'd
certainly consider it. (Sorry for not being more clear on the guide's
intended format.)*
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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