Technical Documentation Best Practices – Visually Designing Modern Help Systems and Manuals: Layout, Formatting, Templates

Aesthetics isn’t the only thing that you should be striving for when desiging a user manual template or the style sheet of an online help system. When creating technical documentation, usability, readability, and simplicity are at least just as crucial.

The design should please the eye, but at the same time it must communicate the content clearly. In addition, paragraph styles and character styles should be efficient to use for the author when writing the document. The layout process should be automated as much as possible. Because most user assistance documents are frequently updated during theit life cycle, an automated layout process is much more important here than with other kinds of literature.

Setting up templates and style sheets that are efficient to use when creating and updating user assistance requires a lot of experience in technical writing. The rules presented in this book are the essence of this experience.

All chapters provide various examples that you can use for inspiration and as starting points for your own designs.

Topics covered:

• Layout basics
• Setting the type area
• Choosing fonts and spacing
• Creating semantic styles
• Organizing styles hierarchically
• Recommended screen layouts
• Recommended page layouts
• Recommended table designs
• Recommended paragraph styles
• Recommended character styles