Good afternoon folks,
I’ve been tasked with redesigning my company’s technical manuals for heavy equipment. I have a lot of decisions to make about how to handle the look, organization, and interactive components. I have mostly free rein (until our marketing director wields her red pen), which is nice, but sometimes I struggle with too great a multitude of options.
Right now, what I want to focus on is the layout and interactivity of the parts drawings and parts lists (of which there are two – master parts & recommended spares). Enough of our customers use a computer to view the PDF that links are worth the hassle – I want to give them the functionality of being able to click on the part number in a drawing to jump to a photo, or click on a part listing to jump to the drawing to view its placement in the assembly and any assembly notes. Eventually we will have an online parts ordering system that the manual will need to tie in with, but luckily that’s a long way down the road.
I was hoping others with similar projects would be willing to share their best practices regarding the interactive components. Cross references? Hyperlinks? Both? Other?
Additionally, if anyone has both drafting AND page design experience, I would love to compare notes. I learned INDD in 2004ish as a newspaper editor, and then went back to college for a degree in drafting in 2011, so I have decent fluency in Solidworks and AutoCAD/Draftsight (Revit, Civil3D, etc too, but that’s not what we use here). If there are any great tips to prepare DWGs, DXFs and Solidworks models & drawings for insertion into an INDD document, that would be good to know. I feel like there are shortcuts and tricks I might be missing.
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