Technical Communication A Total A-to-Z guide to creating professional-quality user manuals on time, on budget-on your PC You don2t need to pay an outside specialist a small fortune to produce your user manuals for you. Let leading technical communications expert Ken Whitaker show you how you can create your own professional-quality user manuals at a fraction of the cost-on your PC. Writing for readers with little or no desktop publishing experience, Ken guides you through the entire process, from organizing the material and writing the documentation to designing and printing the manual. Chapter-by-chapter, step-by-step, he creates a sample user manual, using the leading Windows-based desktop publishing applications-FrameMaker and Corel Ventura. Along the way, he supplies you with loads of insider tips and tricks for producing the most readable, attractive manuals possible, on time and on budget. You2ll learn how to: Research the product, organize the material, and plan the manual in a layered, object-oriented approach Write very readable, user-friendly copy Use fonts, templates, graphic formats, and page layout techniques Take professional screenshots to complement your text Produce professional drawings and images even if you2re not an artist Use sophisticated techniques like sideheads and table numbering And much more Let A Guide to Publishing User Manuals show you how to write, design, and produce professional-quality user manuals without the professional fees.
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Ken Whitaker, PMP has over 20 years of executive line management experience with leading technology companies in a wide variety of industries including healthcare, insurance estimating, marketing merchandising, real-time control, embedded, wireless, mobile GIS, and presentation graphics (remember Harvard Graphics?). Ken has held executive management positions at Data General (now EMC), Software Publishing Corporation, AC Nielsen, USDATA (now UGS), and Solucient (now Thomson Medical). Ken is currently Director of Engineering at Seattle-based Datalight, a leading provider of reliable embedded systems software solutions. Ken graduated from James Madison University (JMU) with an emphasis in Mathematics and Fine Arts and attended Virginia Techs (VPI&SU) Computer Science and Applications graduate school. He is also Project Management Professional (PMP) certified and an active member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and a member of the Seattle, WA PMI chapter. Ken is also a member of the Puget Sound Chapter of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD).
