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This is in a close tie with "Dear Mom," as Rule One of Technical Communication:
"Nobody *ever* posts change-pages."
I've mentioned before that I spent much of my first six weeks in Germany
working with the Change-Page NCO getting all of our "critical" manuals
updated ( I was the first private they'd gotten in about a year).
By the time we finished, we'd had another metric ton of new change-pages
come in... never quite got those done while I was there...
If you can swing it at all, please please please champion the idea of
sending a whole-new book, or at least a replacement chapter (often
difficult when there's a change on every other page, I know).
Frame and Interleaf can handle "dotted" change-pages if it's the best of
several bad options, but it's bloody difficult in Word (IMNSHO) -- say
you've got a change on page 17 that bumps one paragraph to page 18, and
propagates a new last page (call it 31) when there's already a page 31 in
the next chapter: for some government-focused pubs we've had to do page
17.a with the bumped paragraph, a "this page intentionally left blank"
page, page 18 starting on a new left page, and the newly-propagated page 31
goes away..... for other jobs I've seen page 17.a, 18.a, etc...
As far as instructions go, in most places where I've buckled down and done
change-pages to pay rent, the cover of the batch of changed pages contains
explicit instructions on where to put them.... and a note/caution/warning
about why the change was necessary....
Assertively wishy-washy, I wish you luck 8-)
dan'l
On Fri, 9 Apr 1999 Randall Larson-Maynard
<randall -dot- larson-maynard -at- IND -dot- ALSTOM -dot- COM> wrote:
>This is new one for me.
>
>How do you handle change pages for customers? Do you send the pages and
>hope the
>customer knows what to do with them? Is there a general format, or is there no
>general way to handle this?
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Dan Brinegar Information Developer/Research Droid
"Leveraging Institutional Memory through Contextual
Digital Asymptotic Approximations of Application Processes suited to
utilization by Information-Constrained, Self-Actualizing
Non-Technologists."
vr2link "at" vr2link.com CCDB Vr2Link http://www.vr2link.com Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.
