RE: front matter in manuals
Our manuals have front matter that include subjectssuch as, who is
intended to read the books, objectives, using the documentation etc.
For some reason the following section also appears there:
"Document conventions: This guide assumes you have a working knowledge
of your computer and its operating conventions, including how to use a
mouse, standard menus and commands. It also assumes you know how to
open, save and close files. For help with any of these techniques,
please see your Windows documentation."
Our user guides are intended for quite technical people, and today,
when everyone knows how to use a computer, is such a section
redundant?
I agree that this is probably redundant. For example, in our manuals (our product is a network management system for highly knowledgeable IT professionals), we used to have a glossary of terminology. It had a bunch of simple IT terms such as RAM, SNMP, etc. We pulled it out because it was highly unlikely that anyone reading these guides would need such a basic overview.
If your audience is that specific, then you can probably pull that out.
Cheers,
Kevin
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