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Subject:common text in manuals--what's your process? From:"Lisa Bronson" <Lisa -dot- Bronson -at- ipaper -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:46:51 -0500
[cross-posted to framers and techwr-l]
If you write manuals for products with a lot of similarities and only a few
variations, Iâd be interested in hearing about your process.
Iâve been using FrameMaker for 3 or 4 years. I never received any formal
training, though we had an employee from our sister company come for a day
to get us started. This year, I dove into learning conditional text on my
own. Itâs awesome stuff, Iâve been thrilled with it, and have done two
manuals using it. Iâm finding, though, that our variations are a bit too
complex for conditional text (particularly when I go back to do updates and
canât figure out *what* I was thinking 4 months ago when I set it up!).
A friend of mine who is a tech writer and uses Frame extensively suggested
using text insets to make separate books for the major differences (for
example, models--one of my product lines has two models, basic and advanced
hygiene; one has three, based on the size cartons it fills; and one, a
spout applicator, has about seven, based on which filler model it goes on),
and then use conditional text for the minor differences within those books
(for example, one product line can have a left- or right-hand
configuration, which affects some text, but mostly affects graphics; the
spout applicator has three different welding methods, and the procedures
and graphics vary based on that).
My estimation is that 90% of each product lineâs text and perhaps 20% of
the graphics are identical. I produce manuals exclusively (no online help,
though we may get to that someday), in hard copy and pdf.
So, I set out to do this for my current project. I began saving each
procedure in a separate file and importing them as text insets, placing
model-specific graphics between them. It was all going great, until I
closed and re-opened the first chapter and realized my cross-references
werenât working.
Iâve gotten approval to get a day of custom, one-on-one training on this a
week from Monday, and want to go into that with as much information as
possible. If any of you who use conditional text, text insets, variables,
or ANY other means for using the same text in multiple manuals would be
willing to share your experience and processes, I would greatly appreciate
it!
