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There are two approaches that have been used for over two centuries.
1. Design an attractive sample page. Count the characters on it.
Determine how much space you feel should, on average, be taken up by
illustrations (in order to make an aesthetically appealing book), and do
the necessary arithmetic to allow for that percentage of space to be
taken away from the type area. Decide how many pages you want the book
to be. Write the copy to fit. (Note: This works for a marketing
brochure. I do not recommend this for a manual.)
2. Write the manual and count the characters. Design the illustration
you feel are needed to inform the reader. Then, based on the number of
copies you plan to print, decide how many pages the book can be.
Subtract the area required for illustrations and divide the remainder by
the number of characters. This is how many characters you need to get on
a page. Design a page that accommodates that many characters in an
attractive, readable format.
Here's the real problem. The traditional approach is to submit the
manuscript to the publisher, who then contracts with a freelance book
designer to solve the problem you have posed (approach number 2 above).
The modern jack-of-all-trades techwriter approach is to guess at a page
design, font, and size, and then sit down and start writing. The
tradeoff is that if you guess wrong, you may end up with an unwieldy
number of pages. The upshot of that is that you have to go back and
change the design, then repaginate the book. Fortunately, modern
publishing programs can handle that part more or less automatically.
In any case, there is no standard rule for the number of words on a
page. It is dependent entirely on your choices of page size, margins,
fonts, sizes, length of sections, space allowed for headings, ... , the
list goes on.
Dick
Steve Fraiberg wrote:
>
> Can someone tell me how many words or characters constitutes a page when
> calculating the number of pages in a manual. How are graphics factored in to
> this number?
>
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