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I work with Carla, so my opinion on this will only be mildly helpful, but I can provide some more insight into why this issue has been raised. I'm all for taking this list out of our manuals (I initiated the effort, in fact) because the list is located in the Preface, among the descriptions of the icons used and stuff like that. I find it hard to believe that anyone ever bothers to look at the Preface, so I doubt that the table gets noticed, let alone used. It's just one more thing for us to maintain as writers, and I already have enough work to do.
Mind you, I'm not suggesting that we take out the whole Preface because most of that other information is boilerplate across manuals, so it doesn't take much effort to maintain, and it does contain valid information. I just want to remove this list of cross-references to the chapter titles and the one-sentence descriptions that go with them because I think the list is more trouble than it's worth. If you reorder the chapters in the manual, you have to reorder the list. If you rephrase the chapter title and delete the cross-reference marker, you have to fix the broken links. If you copy and paste a chapter title from one chapter to another, you get broken links in the PDF file unless you delete the pasted marker and relink the cross-reference. (You get my point.)
It might make more sense if the information existed in an Introduction, but the way that the Introduction section is structured now, it covers an introduction to the printers themselves, not to the manual. Rather than reorganizing a manual that seems to work otherwise, my opinion is to drop the table and put the effort into writing the procedures and other information that our users truly need.
And to respond to everyone else's recommendation to ask our users. That sounds great, but how??? We don't have a way to contact our end users. All we can do is ask other people--such as you, our esteemed technical writing peers--how they use a similar manual. When you want to see what's contained in a printed manual, do you turn to the TOC or the index, or do you look for a list of chapter descriptions somewhere else in the manual? I can honestly say that I have *never* used a list like this when searching for content. If I have a particular topic in mind, I'll start with the index. If I can't find what I need in the index, I'll try the TOC. If I can't find anything there, I usually pitch the manual and search the internet or go find a person who can help me. Am I typical?
Donna
Donna L. Jones
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Technical Writer II
Zebra Technologies Corp.
Vernon Hills, IL
djones -at- zebra -dot- com
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