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Ask HN: creating nice user manuals?

2 pointsdavidw5 comments

I've got a friend who asked me for some advice on creating nice printed user manuals for a physical product. Since he also needs to do translations, separating layout from content is fairly important - he doesn't want to have to fix 10 documents if he changes the layout.

My first thought was DocBook, which I know and use (for Hecl, amongst other things). It's definitely oriented towards programming, but I think it's big enough that it would work for a standard sort of manual too. Anyone have experience using it for really nice looking printed materials, though? Or alternative suggestions? LaTeX can produce some really beautiful output, but is probably tougher for most people to work with, and doesn't separate content from layout 100%. Someone also mentioned Adobe's "indesign". Could OpenOffice be pressed into doing what's needed? What else is out there?

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Adobe InDesign is the way to go if you've already got it (It's not cheap). There's a lot you can do with it, but learning the basics is easy enough. There's also plenty of great looking InDesign templates available on the internet. OpenOffice could be used I suppose but that's going to be more trouble than it's worth.

My recommendation: Hire someone off oDesk or purchase a premium template for InDesign. I'm not sure exactly hat you mean by seperating layout from content. Anytime the content changes by a reasonable amount it's going to need adjustments of the design no matter what program you use.

The idea is to be able to basically shop out the translations and be able to easily flow them into the resulting document. If he wants to change the layout, then it's easy to regenerate all the various translations, too, rather than going in and changing it for each and every one.

Why not do it as HTML/CSS then? The design only has to be done once and the translations could be imported via XMl or PHP includes or something. That would allow for a bit of a fluid layout and give you a web version automatically as well. The only problem I see is that if you translate to say, Chinese, I'm guessing you'll send up with a lot fewer characters and trying to fit it in the same design might not look very good.

They want pretty rigid control over the printed docs that come out of the whole thing. Is there a way to generate a PDF from HTML in a predictable way like that?

imho, you only need one reference : http://headrush.typepad.com/

Kathy Sierra is the goddess of techniques in bringing out user happiness. I would suggest you go back to the archives and read from the first blog post (the last posts are a distraction for your objective)

In addition, if you have spare time to read "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin is an awesome read.

edit: I understand you are looking for technical suggestions. Nevertheless, Kathy does talk about "kick ass" manuals.

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