By: Lauren Olson
JETPUBS presents our Manuals Department: a team of expert publishers and quality control specialists who bring you a combined experience of more than 50 years in the publishing industry. Our manuals experts’ backgrounds include work in Technical Publications Departments at major airlines, work in publishing houses, and degrees in technical and professional writing.
Formatting and grammar are our world. We enjoy browsing for new fonts, reading on the weekends, and creating templates. We spend our days in front of the computer, working with many different software programs to meet our customers’ every need. Throughout our many years in the industry, we’ve immersed ourselves in technical manuals, and we’ve learned a few things along the way. Our manuals team has seen aviation manuals from hundreds of companies, and, because of that, we’re able to offer you the best solutions for your manuals.
Our first expert recommendation for our customers is to put their manuals into Adobe FrameMaker. Sure, Microsoft Word is great for throwing together a quick handout, but it does not handle an 800-page document too well. Adobe FrameMaker offers our customers industry-specific solutions to create the best manuals possible including:
- Automated TOCs. Ensure Chapter and Manual Table of Contents always include the correct page number, as well as hyperlinks to individual pages for ease of use
- Automated LEPs. Breeze through creating a List of Effective Pages in FrameMaker and automatically update it with each revision
- Automated Indices. Easily locate all instances of FARs in a manual, or sort an Employee Handbook by category
- Automated Bookmarks. Create a tool for pilots to quickly browse any manual on their iPad while in the cockpit
- Convenient Foldouts. FrameMaker makes it easy to switch between page sizes, accommodating for as many diagram foldouts as a customer may need
- Standardized Formatting. Custom Tag catalogs to ensure that a note is formatted the same in every chapter and numbered lists are always subcategorized the same way
- Large Documents. Working with the book-within-a-book feature in FrameMaker allows the program to handle large documents (we’re talking hundreds of pages), while still maintaining that automated front matter and hyperlinks
- Elimination of Page/Section Breaks. Those who have built aviation manuals in Microsoft Word understand the important need for Page Breaks and Section Breaks to include Revision Dates and Revision Numbers on each individual page. With FrameMaker, these breaks become a thing of the past
While Microsoft Word has continued to expand their options making it more user-friendly than ever, our manuals experts still have not found a program quite like Adobe FrameMaker. Bring it up to one of our manuals team members, and it’s hard to get them to stop talking about the amazing features Adobe FrameMaker has to offer.
In an ever-changing industry, our customers need a publishing tool that can accommodate the needs of their manuals. Whether your manuals include a ton of diagrams or many pages, are printed or viewed electronically, our Manuals Department is here to offer you the best solution for manuals across your entire company.