H4y^3, hedley.finger at myob.com wrote:
> The example of the Turbo Tarburner was chosen with care. Even as we > bicker, a major automotive manufacturer is implementing an on-demand > customised workshop manual. > > The mechanic will simply enter the car's body number or VIN or > whatever, and a custom manual for just the equipment in that build > will be created on the fly and presented on screen. It makes perfect sense - the information about what the car is equipped with has to be pretty easy to obtain. Even things like the service history of a vehicle should be stored electronically in one of its numerous computers. Writing it in a book that sits in the glove box for the life of the car is pretty silly. > The mechanic will be able to use a TOC, Index, or boolean search > engine to find the instructions they need. The index is there for > people who, unlike us, do NOT work in the IT industry and have a more > sophisticated approach to information retrieval. But EVERYBODY knows > how to use a back-of-the-book index -- even if it is on-line! Maybe, though I usually think of an index as being a collection of shortcuts necessary because the information is difficult to find by other means. Of course it is difficult to find things in hardcopy, but in an electronic product I might question whether the user interface is as good as it could be. For our mechanically gifted friend, I'd be inclined to provide a graphic interface and a touch screen that let him drill to the warp drive than compel him to hunt and peck on a toughened keyboard. An index may have its place, but it's a much smaller home than where it used to live. > And they will probably print out just the pages they need to fix the > warp drive. Perhaps they could load the printer with gasket paper - at least that way they'd be able to recycle effectively... Have a good weekend, Hedley! Marcus