I just finished a fabulous doc set! But now I'm in a bit of a bind... My company has grown, and so has its documentation. For the most recent release, I had to redesign the printed documentation to address some issues that had arisen as our product line has grown. The docs are all done in unstructured FM with some bits in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and online help in WebWorks ePublisher.
The current doc set comprises 5 manuals, 2 getting started guides, 4 quick-reference cards, and a binder with cover and spine inserts. The manuals are 7"x8.5" (half legal size) and the QRCs are 7.5"x8.5" so they act as dividers between the manuals. The manuals are Wir-O bound so they can fold back on themselves; this has been extraordinarily popular with our reader base of IT professionals. Then 1/2-inch in from the binding the manuals are 3-hole drilled to fit the binder. The getting started guides are skinny little saddlestitched 5.5" x 8.5" booklets that fit in pockets inside the binder. The whole package looks quite sharp, and it is functional, too. The binder serves as a home for the manuals, any of which might be used at different times by different people within an IT office. It keeps our logo visible on the bookshelf, and makes it easy to find our books (which had been a problem because the Wir-O binding looks like every other book on the shelf). So what's the problem? The new binders do not fit in the newly redesigned shipping box for our product. The guy who led the redesign is the VP Development. He used to be my boss and knew about the binder project, but somehow never remembered to talk to me about the doc sets, which are supposed to go into the box. Now the binder is too fat by 1/4" so it cannot go into the box. Obviously I can't push back on him. Customers who upgrade from a previous version can get the full docset in the binder because they are paying for the shipping anyway - they are not affected by the product box issue because they already got their product. But new customers get everything in the box, and the binder doesn't fit. The chief does not want to add a new box to the deliverables, so shipping the docset separately has been nixed. So I have about 500 binders that I cannot use. I am willing to pass them on at cost to anyone who can use them. I will gladly provide the templates for everything (the manuals (FM), the book covers and binder cover (AI), the QRCs (FM), the getting started guides. The templates are set up for single-sourcing, too - I output the FM files as print, online pDF, and three WebWorks Help projects, and I have to rebrand it all for a partner when it is finished. You can have the WebWorks templates, too. These are good, solid, attractive templates that work well. If you need some or all of the binders, or if you want the templates for the docs that fit the binders, please contact me offlist at jsgammato at imprivata.com. John Sgammato Principal Technical Writer Imprivata, Inc. [v] (781) 674-2441 www.imprivata.com "OneSign is single sign-on for the rest of us, with an innovative technology that makes adding almost any application a snap, doing away with manually scripted login procedures, and saving time and money." - Information Security, "Products of the Year", 2006