Re: How many pages...etc./R. Mateosian

["Keith S. Wilkinson" <keithw -at- LSI -dot- YOKOGAWA -dot- CO -dot- JP>]

Jack Shaw said...

>>Thirty years ago, half of the things we did in tech. manuals are
>>no longer being done. Then, we had a stable of graphic artists and
>>designers to help us illustrate concepts and do page layout. Now,
>>unless the graphics are screen copies or clip-art silliness, very
>>little useful conceptual illustration gets put into tech. publications
>>at an OEM level.

>>To wit: when was the last time you read anything on TECHWR-L
>>from a tech. illustrator/graphic designer? Is there such a person
>>in the business any more?

>>the quality of PC paint/Corel Draw have a way to go to equal the good
>>old days of even the simplest handdrawn graphic illustration and design.

John -dot- Renish -at- conner -dot- com  commented:

>Technical illustration is alive and well. A close friend works as a
>freelancer, mostly doing technical illustration using software tools on all
>common hardware platforms. He can do it by hand, too, if the customer wants
>it that way, and sometimes does hand work that he subsequently scans or uses
>as a template for use in a graphic application.

LaVonna F. Funkhouser  (lffunkhouser -at- halnet -dot- com)  added:

>My company employs graphic artists and technical illustrators.  Our
>illustrations are fairly complex.  They used to be done by hand, but
>now we scan the old handdrawn graphics to remake them in Corel Draw.

Chuck Melikian  (chuckm -at- MDHOST -dot- CSE -dot- TEK -dot- COM)  added:

>the ability to create a library of graphic elements that can be reused
>saves time when developing new material.

>We can take our engineers drawings and convert them to a format
>we can use and then incorporate them into the service documentation.
>That wasn't possible in the old days.

Back in the "good old days", here in Japan, a single paper drawing used to
cost
$100 or $200 and take days or weeks.  Then along came the J-Star, the Japanese
version of Xerox's Star workstation.  Although the Star was a flop in the US,
the J-Star (several years before Japanese Macs got established) was the first
Japanese environment with optional graphics.  Here kindergarten kids (and
kids in primary school) seem to spend a lot of time drawing/sketching.
The J-Star was expensive, difficult to use, slow, and limited to files of up to
20 pages or so -- but it was very popular with people who like drawing...
Then along came the Mac, much faster and cheaper...

There are a lot of new tools, but maybe they are not being used to their
fullest...
Many older illustrators want 3-D graphic systems to replace their pencil,
paper,
and drawing board -- they don't want to use PC/Mac 2-D packages.  The 3-D
packages mostly run on expensive workstations, are difficult to learn, and
provide output in pen-plot HPGL format (very ugly lettering) rather than
Adobe Illustrator (the preferred DTP format).  (Maybe the cheapest solution
is to scan and trace hand drawings.)  Often there are no tools for managing
a library of reusable graphic elements.  Perhaps the most exciting develop-
ment (possibility for the future) is the video interface card that allows you
to capture snapshot video frames from a camcorder;  such snapshots can
be traced in Illustrator or Canvas, so virtually anyone can "draw" -- a
professional illustrator is no longer required to do professional-looking
"drawings"...