A Graphics Library...Why?

[DeRosier, Edward]

Hi Eduardo,

Seems like the answering messages got hijacked with wistful desires for
features and specifications...

To get back to your request, I intuit that you are documenting standard
work policies, either already existing or possibly needed.  To support
the creation of your library, you can imagine various uses in the near
future.  Your own list included:

  Traceability
  Locating Graphics
  Documentation Mapping

If a Writer needs a compound image with existing parts or with a
combination of existing and new parts (parts = the widgets your writers
are documenting), what is the most economical and the most convenient
way to get started?

For consistent documents and also for ease of building a drawing, having
a stock of drawing building blocks makes a lot of sense.   In my current
job, we write maintenance manuals with various test setups.  The test
instruments and the test components are collected in a library as we
create them (while drawing a new test setup).  When we add a new
instrument to a standard test, we can collect standard drawings and
symbolic components so that all of our test descriptions in all of our
manuals have a similar style.  This is intended to give the customers a
comfortable feeling while following our instructions.

Our test instruments are fairly complex signal generators, power meters,
spectrum analyzers, and vector network analyzers.  We create outline
drawings in Adobe Illustrator that show the connections, buttons, and
display panels.  We find our library of images both convenient and cost
effective.  It certainly saves time by having many drawing components
already available for copy and paste.

I can image a procedure that describes:

  General formatting and styles for drawings
  Storage locations, names, and groupings (folders/subdirectories) for
convenient search
  Grayscale drawings and color images for different document purposes
  Photos versus drawings

A new team member would want to know what style is required and where to
find examples.  Your SOP could answer such questions and serve as a
reminder to the whole team for both storage and recall of new and
existing images.

I hope this is helpful.  Auditors seem to have a need to justify these
things.

Ed DeRosier