Manual design (not layout)!

[Niklas_Östergren@adobeforums.com]

Hi!

I have, today, been on a seminar where we got some information about Adobe Acrobat!

On this seminar the mentioned a lot of stuff and it was a lot of new things to me. So I didn´t get it all.

Now to my Q:

I work on a company and have mainresponsability for production and delivery of user manuals on a punching machine. The manuals consist of plain text (Word), tables (Excell) and drawings (Auto-Cad and Solid Work).

We deliver manuals in apr. 5 languages and we want to keep track of which version of manual is delivered with which machine.

I have inherit a lot of pagemaker files produced in PM4 - PM6. We have, today, PM 7.0 so I have started to use layers for different languages. But I´m not happy about the manual system we have, at all.

Each section of the manual is today stored as a seperat file (PM4/PM5 or PM6).

Since I quite new to using Adobe programs I don´t know which way to handle this is the best way. In the end we are, probably, going to deliver the manual digital on a CD or/and on the web. But I´m sure we also need to be able to print it to deliver a paper manual to some customer anyway.

How would you handle this task?
What programs would you use to do what?
And how would your structure look like (files/folders)?

TIA!
// Niklas

[Aandi_Inston@adobeforums.com]

I wouldn't use PageMaker for manuals. I would use FrameMaker,
personally (and so do Adobe).

Aandi Inston

[Fr._Watson@adobeforums.com]

Your post has a lot of questions in it, so I'll just deal with the following...

Each section of the manual is today stored as a seperat file (PM4/PM5
or PM6).





Since I quite new to using Adobe programs I don´t know which way to handle
this is the best way. In the end we are, probably, going to deliver the
manual digital on a CD or/and on the web. But I´m sure we also need to
be able to print it to deliver a paper manual to some customer anyway.





How would you handle this task?




You can make a PDF from each individual section of the manual,(in Framemaker you could assemble these into a "Book" file, which you could make a PDF from; I don't recall if this option (or one like it) is available in Pagemaker) and then, using Acrobat, 'stitch together' the individual sections into one complete PDF of your manual, which you could then use for printing, CD, or the web.

[Niklas_Östergren@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for your replys!

What about FrameMaker. I have never worked with it and know nothing about it.

Is it easy/possible to asmable text and bitmaps, dxf-files together and make the text looks nice?

How about texthandling, easy to format, to index and so on?

Reguards!
// Niklas