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Subject:What good is it if you can't find it? From:"Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher5 -at- cox -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 15 Nov 2002 11:22:58 -0800
In the content v. design wars, chalk up two points for
design.
Beth Kane needed to know how to turn off the drawing
canvas in Word. Well, I knew where the checkbox was
because I'd stumbled across it, and the What's this?
help works just fine. But there was no index entry
link to AutoShapes, where Beth was looking for it, so
the content might as well not have existed.
I just upgraded to Corel 11 and if you've ever used
Corel in the past, you know they supply a bunch of
symbol fonts that you can display on a tablet and
drag and drop into a drawing. I couldn't find that
feature anywhere in Corel 11. Turns out they changed
the name of the function from Insert Symbol to Insert
Character. A link to the help topic from a keyword
"symbol" would have made my life easy. I eventually
found out about the switch at the online knowledge
base.
Please note, I am not dismissing content as non-essential.
But if all you want is content, you can ask an engineer for
it. Content is absolutely useless if you can't find it.
The art and skill of technical writing is a combination
of information and design and you cannot supply one without
the other and still call yourself a technical writer. And
no, I'm not talking about "font fondling", I'm talking
about good, solid, information design that makes the content
accessible to the user.
My two cents on a *way* too serious Friday. ;-)
-Sue Gallagher
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