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Subject:Book size: how much is too much? From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Wed, 26 Aug 1998 11:19:40 -0600
Luigi Benetton commented on a problematic Reference Guide, all 800+
pages of it (and growing):
<<we've put the latest version in a binder to make sure users can
keep the book flat when it's open.>>
Kill off the binder. If users open the book frequently, the pages
start falling out really soon. Speaking purely personally, I find
that anything longer than 500 pages is physically unmanageable and
unusable. You could trim the length by increasing the size to 8.5X11
inches, but it's still one mongo book.
<<We like the smaller size of paper we use, but we might consider going
to 8 1/2" by 11". Would this help much?>>
Well, you're going from about 60 square inches per page to around 90,
which means 50% more room.But would the larger book fit on the
average user's desk, beside or in front of the computer or whatever?
My first instinct given this and your statement that <<the bad news
is that the book is going to get bigger!>> is that this is a project
literally screaming for help... online help, that is. (Whether
WinHelp, Apple Guide, PDF, or HTML is another story.) There's no
question that you can solve the problem physically by moving to
larger paper and different binding systems, but I think that then
you're attacking entirely the wrong problem.
<<We don't want to convert the main sections of the Reference Guide
into separate books since it's annoying to have to open another book
to look up a cross-reference.>>
If you're dead set on preserving this as a printed product, then it's
long past time to do some task analysis. How often would readers
really have to open a second book? Without knowing more about the
nature of the application (publishing? programming? managing?), I
can't venture a guess how to break things up, but it's relatively
rare that someone would have to flip back and forth between multiple
books. My only experience with this was using a four-foot shelf of
documentation for Interleaf Publisher, and on the whole, I didn't
find it an onerous problem. I strongly suspect that you'll be able to
solve the cross-referencing problem simply by repeating relatively
small sections of one book within another, thus avoiding the need to
flip books.
Can you provide more details on the nature of the application and the
reference information so we can have a second whack at the problem?
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it."--Author unknown
