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Shampa,
First, you should be matching the existing style guide, if any. Your
employer or client should already have one. If not, then whatever
you do becomes the de facto style guide, as something for future
writers either to emulate or to avoid.
Also, you may discover that the existing style guide is one of the
kind that must be avoided, and then avoiding it becomes one of your
tasks.
Here's an example of that sort of situation. My recently completed
work was for a company that had been using page numbers such as
"3.4.2", "3.4.3" and so forth, on the assumption that by using chapter
and section numbers they would make it easier to replace part of
a book when there was only a minor change. Until I explained it,
they did not realize that straight-through numbering was better,
because they were now publishing only on-line PDF versions of their
books. Style is driven by the customer's understanding of his
desires and his needs.
Personally, I like printed material to show a chapter name on each
page, where the chapter name is carefully chosen and actually
describes what is in the chapter. On the other hand, some people
(especially tech writers who have been asked to use primitive
word-processing software that cannot support this style) find this
so-called running header to be a bad choice.
No matter what you use for the style of headers and footers, someone
will think that it's not right. Those who expect printed books
will want separate recto and verso, but anyone just pumping out
single-sided sheets on the laser printer will loathe that style.
Be prepared for your customer to change his mind on matters of style
late in the process.
--Peter
Wise guy: "It takes longer, and it costs more."
Dumb guy: "What does?"
Wise guy: "Everything."
On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:49:15 +0530, Shampa <shampa -at- quantum-bso -dot- com> wrote:
Hi All,
I am new to tech writing I like to know, what are the information should
ideally be present in Header and Footer [of each page] of a user guide.
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