Thumbnail images of the possible reports?

["Geoff Hart" <Geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Sean Brierley is working on documenting <<... a report 
generator... The development team wants to include... in the 
book, the first page of each of the 35 reports, so the customer 
can browse the book and look at the reports to see what 
information each includes... [and] determine whether a 
customized report is really needed.>>

I'm not your customer. What would _they_ like? Speaking as 
a hypothetical user of your product, I don't want to know 
what each report looks like and what it includes: I want to tell 
you what my needs are and ask whether any of the existing 
reports will provide the information I need. And if none of 
them will do it, then I need you to tell me to build the report 
myself. That being the case, it might be far more efficient to 
dispense with both the graphics and (as you mentioned later 
in your original message) the bulleted lists and replace them 
with something better. What might that "something better" 
look like?

In print, a table would do the job nicely. (You could also use 
a flowchart, but not everyone's comfortable with these 
things.) List all the fields that could be included in the 35 
reports down the margin, and the 35 report types across the 
top of the page, and use checkmarks to show which reports 
contain each field. That would produce a really messy, 
multipage table, so you'd be wiser to break the 35 reports into 
several categories; that would give you fewer report types 
across the top of the table, and fewer fields down the side of 
the table. Then use a table of contents to point readers to the 
appropriate table (e.g., sales reports are on page 1, profit 
reports are on page 2, human resources reports are on page 3, 
etc.) Neat, sweet, petite, and complete... plus very easy to use.

You could use the same approach online, but why make the 
users do the hard work of filtering through the tables when 
this sort of thing is fairly easy to program? Let's dream in 
technicolor for a moment, and assume you can actually ask 
the developers to create a form that lists all the fields, and let 
users check off the ones they need. Once they hit the "build a 
report for me" button, the software will do one of two things: 
open the predefined report that is closest to what the user 
requested and add in the missing fields, or (if no report is 
really close enough to make this worthwhile) tell the user that 
none of the existing options really work, and that they're on 
their own. In effect, why ask users to locate an appropriate 
report type (a whole extra step) when they could instead 
simply specify what they need to have reported, and let the 
software determine whether this report already exists?

Apart from that, it sounds like your main concern involves 
the difficulty of getting the images of the reports into 
FrameMaker and producing manageable file sizes. That being 
the case:

<<The reports are designed to print to a default printer at US-
letter size. I woulod capture each by printing to a PS file and 
making a PDF, which I would subsequently import into 
FrameMaker.>>

Sounds like you're going through too many hoops. Frame 
should work just fine with TIFF or EPS files. So if you print 
to a PS file, open the file in your favorite image editor, resize 
it so you can fit (say) one or more legible report types per 
page, and then convert it to a bitmap. Should cut the file size 
drastically. If you need to put the resulting document on the 
Web, you could then create a PDF from the frame file (or 
perhaps one PDF per report type) and make those files 
downloadable by those who are interested.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"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)