Installation-Guides Valuable to Proper Setup
Now all this type of information is available on-line in Adobe PDF files for easy access by consumers. Although, some are small projects other ones are much more elaborate. The main reason for this technical document is to assist the customer or user through the process of installing something. This may be a new car stereo or an operating system on a computer. Although the two products are quite different the methodology is similar. Our installation-guide starts with a set of tool icons for our car stereo example. Each represents a tool or new product component needed in the installation. Our next instructions are the steps required to remove the old unit from the car. This followed with instructions on wire harness preparation for the new unit. Lastly, the steps for installing our new car stereo. The car stereo document makes use of many colorful and helpful illustrations showing every step taken. These help clarify the textual steps. The final installation instruction calls the reader for action by asking him or her to make a decision whether to try doing the work by themselves or letting a "professional" to do it for them. They very slyly ask for a skills self-evaluation by the user. Our other example follows a different approach. It starts with an abstract giving the user a pre-amble about the software. It also includes a note which is basically a disclaimer telling the reader that the software is an ongoing project which is mostly up-to-date so there nothing that should go wrong. The guide continues with 8 sections, 6 indexes, and 2 tables sections. The first section deals with the welcome, explaining what the software is about, about the organization, who wrote it, and the copyrights and software licenses. The next section deals with the requirements both hardware and software. Everything that the reader needs to know is discussed. All about supported architecture, graphic cards, multiple processors, hard drives, CD drives, other peripherals and hardware, memory, etc. Followed by a section dealing with all steps before installing the software including an overview, documentation needed, partitioning etc. This section is followed by one on obtaining system installation media dealing with where to get official CD-ROM sets, downloading official files, preparing for automatic installation, bootup etc. Our next section in this installation-guide talks about booting the installation system et al. And it continues... As you can see this is a more complex and larger installation requiring a lot more pages, probably several hundred. This installation-guide example does not use a lot of graphics, the exception being the tables at the end. It relies on shading some of the text, bolding, and italics to draw the user's attention .
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