Numbering Systems for Technical Service Manuals

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:16 -0700 18/5/06, Daniel Emory wrote:

>Nevertheless, this issue about numbering of titled headings, tables and graphics seems to come up frequently. It's a valid issue, and it deserves more discussion on the list.

Surely the answer here is 'horses for courses'? There are many areas where numbering is either appropriate or essential (engineering manuals,legal documents, political documents, medical documents, repair manuals, ya-de-yah), and others where it is not. Legal is one special case: due to its density, every *paragraph* is often numbered.

The problem comes in the gray areas, such as software user guides, where there is the option to use numbering or not to use numbering. Fwiw, my default preference is to cross-reference by section/subsection title and page where required (because, imho, section headings look better without numbers and page cross-references are the most user-friendly), but to number tables and figures. This default is easily (and often) overridden by client preferences.

And just a vaguely relevant note on the intuitive software thread: having taught myself FrameMaker in the early 1990s, I started a contract where a large writing team were required to use Interleaf, none of whom had ever seen it before. Two weeks had been set aside for training and familiarization, but I and others like me who had already worked with a powerful DTP tool such as FrameMaker picked up 90% of Interleaf from scratch in a day or so. And Interleaf is (or was) substantially more arcane than FrameMaker.
-- 
Steve