indoiton - Templates

Do you need a template or style sheet for your printed or online technical documentation?

I can create individual templates for you which go well beyond just looking great and presenting the displayed information in a user friendly, clear and memorable way. A good template must also be efficient for the author who writes the documentation and can thus save a lot of time and money. The savings multiply with each new document and with each update of a document.

While the visual design of a template might also be delegated to a graphic artist, the template definitions in detail require a high degree of expertise in technical writing and the ability to think ahead in terms of future documentation requirements.

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Less is more: Both for the reader and for the writer of technical documentation it is vital to have a very clear design which allows to focus on the content and does not distract any attention. The key rule here is: less is more. A small number of well thought-out styles are much more practical than a plethora of individual styles for every exception you can think of.

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Semantic styles: As another basic principle, styles are never named according to their visual appearance but according to the content of the text they are to be applied on. So, for example, a style will never be named "ArialBold10Point" but rather "emphasis" or "menu item" instead.
This constantly forces the author to reflect the structure of the document and is the key requirement for structured authoring with SGML, XML, DITA, etc. Even if you do not use these methods today, semantic styles make you ready for the future – at no extra cost.
Semantic styles are also essential when you decide to modify the design later on. Imagine you decided to change the font: How would you handle a style such as "ArialBold10Point" then?

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Easy to change: All styles are organized hierarchically in the form of a cascading style sheet. Child styles inherit the properties of their parent styles. Thanks to this approach, for example the font of all styles within a document can be changed with just one click, simply by changing the root style.

▪	Easy to assign: All styles are named so that related styles (e.g. all styles for lists) get displayed directly one below the other in the styles gallery of your authoring tool.

▪	Easy to remember: Hot keys (shortcuts) are defined for the most frequently used styles. A well-tried system ensures that you can even remember these hot keys.

▪	Automated formatting: A sophisticated definition of certain style properties can save a lot of manual formatting work. Pagebreaks, for example, can be automated to a high degree simply by defining the appropriate paragraph style settings.