Re: TECHWR-L Digest - 8 Aug 1998 to 9 Aug 1998

[Walt Tucker <walt_tucker -at- MENTORG -dot- COM>]

Has anyone developed a style guide for online help that they would be willing
to share?  I am part of a team in our company that is trying to come up with
a set of online help guidelines.  That is, we want to start moving towards a
corporate identity and consistent "look and feel" across help systems
(probably WinHelp) on various new PC products.  To date, the guideline has
been no guideline -- do whatever you think works.  The result has been help
on one product that doesn't necessarily resemble the help on another
product.  Looking at what others have done is always helpful.

We are kind of open-ended at this point as to what to suggest, but
obviously don't want to make it too restrictive.  On the other hand, there
needs to be some sort of identity so the help looks like it all came from
the same company rather than (in the future) 30 different writers.  We have
traditionally been a UNIX house, but as more and more of our products shift
to PCs, we are starting to realize we don't yet have a clue with regard to
how to handle "traditional" online help on the PC.  On the UNIX side, most
of documentation goes out in PDF with an augmented Acrobat Exchange wrapper
to group books into bookcases and to handle full-text searching and cross-book
linking.  That paradigm doesn't necessarily apply to all PC products.

Please respond in email, since I haven't had time to keep up with the (rather
large) techwr-l digests that flood my mailbox daily.

Thanks much,

Walt Tucker
Sr. Technical Writer
Mentor Graphics Corp.


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