Creating an Outline of the Contents

Before we started writing the content of this manual we developed a draft outline of its contents, with a heading for every chapter, section, and topic in the document. We recommend that you do the same (if only to help establish how much work lies ahead of you). Some of the things you may want to include in your outline are:

• Introduction: describes the purpose and structure of your document and any conventions used.
• Getting Started: tells your reader how to get started, and can give a general overview of the subject matter. This section often includes quick reference information so your reader can do the most basic tasks without reading the entire document. You can include links to more in-depth topics.
• Main Content: the main content of your document varies according to the subject, and can include descriptive, procedure and reference information.
• Glossaries: it's good to include one or more glossaries to describe terms that may be foreign to your audience. In your Help and Web document outputs, Author-it can automatically find occurences of these terms in the text of each topic and create a hypertext link to their definitions.
• Index: probably one of the most important aspects of a good document, and is often neglected. After all, if readers cannot find the information they are looking for, then the document, no matter how good, becomes useless. Author-it will help you by automatically creating a basic Index, and by providing powerful indexing tools. However, it will be up to you to ensure that a good Index is created - and indexing is a bit of an art.

The key thing to remember when defining your content is not to include too much information about any one topic. Break your topics up into easy-to-handle units, so each deals with only one or two specific points.