Re: documentation planning

["Brierley, Sean" <Brierley -at- QUODATA -dot- COM>]

Hallo:

My company ships three-hole punched.

However, I don't really recommend that. Sending a range of pages (usually a
chapter, plus the obligatory index and TOC updates, and that's assuming you
don't need to xref the new material from existing chapters <g>) is a hit or
miss thing. Sometimes the new pages make it to the book and sometimes the
new pages even get put in the book <g>. The only sure way to do this is to
ship a new, complete tome.

So, what do you do? I am recommending that for each major rev of the product
(you can define major rev), the book get re-written. As soon as the new rev
books are ready, any old rev books left in stock become kindling. That means
planning your print runs is essential to prevent undue overage. This also
means a certain amount of planning--and restraint--in introducing new
features into incremental releases of the product because introducing
significant features into incremental releases of a product will result in
time and printing costs for a new book *plus* the cost of throwing away any
obsolete old books.

Any incremental changes get an updated online help file (I write about
software) and an online book--PDF.

Hope this helps.

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com

>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: Linda Miller [mailto:linda_k_miller -at- HOTMAIL -dot- COM]
>>>My suggestion: don't wire-bound the books. Companies I've
>>>worked for have
>>>shrink-wrapped, 3-hole-punched loose leaf pages with
>>>accompanying 3-ring
>>>binders. Updates can be easily incorporated.
>>>
>>>If there are frequent updates, the manuals really shouldn't
>>>be bound in any
>>>way.
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>Linda K. Miller


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