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I'm designing a user handbook for internal procedures. Although
I'm pushing for eight pages on paper, the rest on-line (the paper
would contain what you need to know when the network is down or
you can't log in and a couple of other essentials), there's
strong pressure to produce a brick of paper we can drop on a
new employee's desk.
My concern is updates--they'll probably come thick and fast in
the early days, then occasional spurts of change. If I have
to produce a brick, can folks recommend a resource discussing the
pros and cons of various pagination/segmentation schemes? (Or
discuss particularly appropriate answers yourself, of course.)
We can go for a chapter-page numbering scheme (4-3, 4-4, etc.)
to minimize disruption on the rest of the table of contents/index
when we insert those three new pages on new code publishing procedures.
This still means that every update has to include a new TOC and index,
and that the numbering for a given section gets out of whack ("Please
delete 4-3 through 4-7, and insert 5-7a through 5-8d as a replacement
for the current 5-7/5-8 page.") That's minimized by short chapters,
but then the actual chapter prefixes aren't much use for locating items.
If I have to go this way, I'll probably select tabs or bleeds to make new
sections visible, but--
Well, you get the idea. You've probably wrestled with this yourself.
Most of my career (which feels longer every day :-) has been dealing
with external documentation where we just shipped an entirely new
document with the next revision. How have other people solved this?
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