Have been working on a project that pulls together some disparate electronics/electrical kit to produce a synergy 😉

The documentation for the individual items is like Cannock – dry and sketchy – and I need to come up with a technical manual for the complete equipment.

Although I have a pretty good idea of the content I want to present it in a contemporary and interesting way. I need some style guidance – layout fonts colours etc

Is there anyone involved in this sort of thing who’d be willing to offer some advice? Or some templates 🙂

Ta very much

Random pictures of kittens and baby robbins, perhaps the Bristol Stool Chart as the Contents Page ?

IGMC

If the manual is going to be used by technical people my top tip is don’t use the word synergy, technical people are likelt to associate it with management BS.

Sometimes a good diagram can make something technical much more engaging and relateable e.g. a functional diagram or flowchart showing how all the components interface.

What would Moss do?

As in IT Crowd.

Be sure to end every section with

Refitting is the reversal of removal.

Even when it clearly needs a totally different hammer.

Is there anyone involved in this sort of thing who’d be willing to offer some advice?

I write guides for apps our engineers use, but I can’t share it with you. So yes my guides are stylish but that’s of no help whatsoever. 🙂

At least 6 different fonts – make sure you use Comicsans as well!

I write a lot of technical feasibility reports.
All sections begin on a new page, all chapter headings in a new column, no paragraphs roll over a column, no hanging words, spell-check everything, no sentences longer than 30 words. [not like that one]

Depending on what it is you are trying to achieve – lots of pictures can be a good thing. You can write a paragraph explaining something badly, or just stick a picture in with an arrow pointing to what it is you are on about.

If you refer to a picture, don’t have the text going over a page, if it can be helped.
Don’t put a pic on one page when the text referring to it starts on the previous or next page. That kind of thing.

Just imagine yourself as the end-user and having to use that doc for the very first time. We often used to get people from other departments to use our SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) once they were about to be released to see how much ‘assumed knowledge’ we had added into the document.

With regards to style – clear & easy to follow, is about all I can add.

I do have some experiance 😆

Online, App or print has got to be the first question?

Marko

Glad I asked 🙂

Have Googled Best Technical Manuals and found some good examples from Apple, Dyson, Western Digital and Amazon amongst others.

As you were fellas

If you’re going to include a “Glossary of terms” then see if you can sneak in an odd one – such as “Pterodactyl: a winged reptile, believed to be extinct”.

“This page intentionally left blank.”

(Yes, I was once, for a short while, a technical writer at IBM.)

I’ll have a look at my bookshelf when I get home and see if there’s anything there to recommend – there is a classic tech comm bible, just can’t remember the title/author for the moment.

Best style is clear style.

“This page intentionally left blank.”

Except it hasn’t, it has words on it….

um…

I used to write/edit/own a credit risk assessment policy.

The above is good advice re paragraphs, heading on new pages etc.

I would include examples and use funny names or my own surname for the business names to give myself lasting immortality e.g. “Pain in the Glass, a local glaziers, wants to borrow £15,000 for blah de blah de blah”

Hi
I have written training manuals for years. I suggest you start with post it notes so you can split the manual into various areas/chapters, and move them around until you have a logical flow. Don’t know what experience you have of computers but in Microsoft I suggest you use styles/headings e.g. chapter heading heading 1, sub chapter heading 2 etc. Use outline view and then you can move sections around. You can then create a table of contents from the headings. Google table of contents in Microsoft Word and Outline view. Good luck.
As regards style/fonts use a non serif font such as arial or verdana. Dyslexic readers really struggle with serif fonts like times new roman.