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I seem to have missed this thread, but here's my two cents worth.
I think the only good solution to the complexity problem for paper manuals
is to make the user documentation entirely task oriented. There is usually a
reasonably small set of tasks to describe. For each task there is probably a
simple path or set of paths through the maze of menus and options.
For this to work there should be good context sensitive online documentation.
A good example of this approach is Microsoft's user documentation for
Access. It's about 200 pages and covers all the bases. They have other
manuals for application developers. They wrote those in a more traditional
style. ...RM
Richard Mateosian Freelance Technical Writer
srm -at- c2 -dot- org Copyright 1996 Review Editor, IEEE Micro http://www.c2.org/~srm/ All rights reserved President, Berkeley STC
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