book size

[Luigi Benetton <Luigi_Benetton -at- MARKHAM -dot- LONGVIEW -dot- CA>]

Hi folks,

We've had complaints about the sheer size of our Reference Guide. It's on 7
1/4" by 9" paper, and because of the amount of information (800+ pages),
we've put the latest version in a binder to make sure users can keep the
book flat when it's open. This is one of the reasons why we didn't choose a
perfect-bound book. It's also too big to go into "spiro-binding" like our
other manuals.

The bad news is that the book is going to get bigger! There's a lot of
information in two smaller guides that belongs in the Reference Guide as
well. We don't want to convert the main sections of the Reference Guide
into separate books since it's annoying to have to open another book to
look up a cross-reference.

We're going to the printer for suggestions on how to deal with the size of
the document. The binder format is definitely going to be canned. We
already publish in PDF, but we also want to continue to provide paper.

Here are some questions that might lead to ideas:

Adobe went from a one-column to a two-column format for the manual for
FrameMaker 5.5. This manual seems smaller than the manual for the previous
version of Frame. I haven't checked the amount of content or font size,
both of which seem approximately the same in both versions, although the
glossary was left out of the later version. Would this make a big
difference?

We like the smaller size of paper we use, but we might consider going to 8
1/2" by 11". Would this help much?

by the way, I'm open to challenges to any of the above assumptions.

Thanks, everybody,

Luigi Benetton

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