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Melroy D'Souza is <<...trying to determine the best way to
present information in a user's manual on three different form
factors of a product sold to business users (not home users).
For example, PCs or computer cases can come as a desktop
unit (horizontal), a mid-tower unit (vertical) or a full-tower
unit (vertical), but with the same internal components.>>
There's no question that you're asking the reader to do more
work if the manual presents all three options and the reader
has to figure out which one applies at each point in the
manual. How significant that extra difficulty will be depends
largely on the situation. With computer cases, it's relatively
trivial, but if the comparison is more complex (e.g., modular
software, with a list of dozens of modules that may or may
not be present), it's going to be far easier for the reader if you
produce a customized manual. I've done enough installations
using a manual for an original product that contained nested
subclauses (about how an instruction changes, depending on
which release of the product you purchased) to be very
negative about the "all in one" approach.
In many cases, the customization isn't particularly difficult to
do: you simply create a checklist of what goes into each
manual, create the text for all the possible variations of each
checkoff item as separate files, then insert the appropriate
files into a new document that you build according to the
checklist. This is much easier to do if you have some form of
document database or similar automation, but you can do it
manually too. One caution: even if each separate file has been
proofread to perfection, always have someone do a separate
reality check on the final, assembled product. I once owned a
GM car whose manual had been published automatically
from a database, and that contained information for another
car in an entirely different product line rather than the info. I
needed for the car I purchased. Don't let that happen to you!
"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens,
something just calling out for us to discover it. But I
suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George
Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)
